A Hundred Days
by pinkolifant
Summary: A wishful end for ASOIAF. And a sequel to Mummers' Show. Rhaegar and Lyanna are alive after everyone believed them dead for almost twenty years. They travel north to find their son Jon Snow and face winter.
1. Chapter 1

I would like to thank my beta Dr. Holland. It makes all the difference to have somebody interested in the fandom check my insignificant contribution.

I own nothing.

Except my own mistakes :-))

**A Hundred Days**

**The shadowbinder**

The blue glow of uncertain dawn stretched into a horizon wrought of ice farther than a red eye could see. In a bright scarlet gown, Lady Melisandre stood on top of the Wall, peering over the edge of the world.

From above, it didn't look that frightening.

Seven hundred feet underneath where the red woman stood, the men were freezing. A tiny black-clad ant could occasionally be seen running between the decrepit crumbling towers of Castle Black. Most had fallen into disuse over the past three turns of the moon, with the cold winds rising. There would be more human bugs in the wormways, she knew. Those long, low tunnels connected the different parts of the main outpost of the Night's Watch under the ground. It was less cold down there, now, at the end of autumn in the North. Both the men of the Night's Watch and the wildlings agreed that the winter was almost upon them. It was the only thing they agreed about. The chill went deep into the bones, unbearable. It was becoming worse day by day, and the nights had already been unspeakably cold for a while. The black wool and boiled leather kept the men alive, but didn't help them feel any warmer.

Lady Melisandre was not cold.

Since the most unfortunate demise of the Lord Commander Jon Snow several months ago, there has been little and less love lost between the two main factions on the Wall. The men of the Seven Kingdoms, the black brothers and King Stannis's men who stayed behind to guard his lady wife, Queen Selyse, and Princess Shireen, his only child and heir, blamed the wildlings, saying they had put mad ideas in Commander Snow's head. They said he went beyond the Wall with his white direwolf, Ghost, on some strange purpose. To save the known world, they said. The Others must have taken them both, for the Lord Commander never returned. That was most certainly the way of it. As it could have been expected, Tormund Giantsbane, the leader of the wildlings since the departure of Mance Rayder, blamed the black brothers, saying they had murdered Jon, a good man, and true-the leader of the Night's Watch and Tormund's friend.

Only a handful of the black brothers knew the truth, and they kept their mouth well shut about it. _It didn't take that many knives in the dark to bring the handsome young man down_, Melisandre remembered with regret. _I warned him though,_ she thought. _He should have listened to me._

She had made an offering of Jon Snow's blood herself, in the haunted forest, accompanied by his murderers, assuring them no one would know who they were. _From her mouth, at least._ It was as good an oath as any. Her fires showed that the truth would come out anyhow and cost the perpetrators their little lives. She didn't see any use in telling them that, so she stayed quiet.

Jon was still breathing very faintly when they lay him in the snow, blood oozing timidly over the white blankness of the land. The offering would quench the appetites of the Great Other for a while, she knew. He was not just anyone. Jon had _king's blood_ after all. Even if he was only a bastard of a proud northern lord, descendant of the old Kings of Winter. Melisandre pitied him from the bottom of her heart when they heard the wolves howling in the forest. _It must feel queer to be feasted upon by one's own sigil,_ she thought. Well, Jon would be unconscious and he would not know.

The weirwood leaves were strangely quiet that day, not responding to the wind as they should. A patch of leaves close to the ground shone bright red in the gloom, where the tree dared stare at her with large weeping eyes. The old gods had no power over her. Melisandre stared back at the tree, and the shine between the foliage was gone.

She prayed that the servants of the Great Other would not linger, or else the wolves would profane the sacrifice meant for them. As if returning her prayers, the sky turned dark grey and green, promising rain. _It might keep the wolves away_, she hoped. The beasts, just like people, preferred to stay dry in the ungodly weather. Even R'hllor was not fond of rain; water quenched the fires...

They left Jon Snow for dead and returned to Castle Black in the dark of the night. When they did, Jon's wolf was gone as she had foreseen. The chains could not stop him. That was very well: she wouldn't have to find someone to put him down. Nearly all men were afraid of Ghost, and most of those who weren't were either secretly not on her side, or they were gone with Stannis.

_It matters little,_ she thought back then. Fresh blood of the kings was already sailing back to Westeros over the narrow sea. Many oarsmen would die to see it through. Those who had it would land in the south, the young queen on Dragonstone and the boy king in the Stormlands. All Melisandre needed was a trustworthy herald to lure them north, to the Wall.

As always, the truth was in the flames. Or in the library, when the fires were not that clear. Old Maester Aemon _Targaryen_, the blood of the dragon kings that Jon had dared send away from her when he was still alive, had left an unfinished book with an account of the Robert's Rebellion and the last years of the power of the House Targaryen. She had read it for inspiration until she could think of a convincing deception, capable of falling on fertile ground. She had read it and then she sent a raven to Mance Rayder in Winterfell, inventing a Targaryen origin for Jon Snow. She didn't even bother to look up the story in her flames, to check if any of it could be true. Ah, the child of poor Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna! The tale of chivalry she weaved could never have happened in the known world. It was too pathetic to be real.

But the best lies had in them a touch of truth. If Jon Snow wanted to protect his little sister so badly that he had sent Mance Rayder and six spearwives to die in Winterfell, it seemed likely that his father, Ned Stark, would also have done anything to protect his younger sister, Lady Lyanna. The former king of the wildlings believed the letter, just as she had hoped, a bard to his core. That much she could see clearly in the tongues of fire. Rayder didn't linger in Winterfell. He immediately headed south, before King Stannis received ill news of Jon...

All men had their uses for the Lord of Light.

It was a shame, in a way. Melisandre had tried so hard to make Jon Snow see the wisdom of believing in R'hllor. He was destined to do great deeds, she had felt it. She had seen it. But now it was all over. At least his wildling friend served the purpose for which Melisandre had spared his life. Mance Rayder would bring north the blood of kings and the fire of dragons she needed to do the will of R'hllor.

The flames never lied.

Alas, the poor, sweet, stubborn man did not know that by the time he would bring the dragons to the Wall to help his wildlings, they would be already forlorn, abandoned to their destiny in the cursed expanse of bough and leaf beyond the Wall. They were to be the fodder for the white walkers, whether they wanted it or not. Mance couldn't know either that Ned Stark's bastard would not be among the living. The life of Jon Snow and the lives of the wildlings were a necessary sacrifice so that R'hllor could protect the Seven Kingdoms. Too many Others had already crossed the Wall, clinging to the shadows of the so called free folk Lord Snow had so imprudently allowed inside. It was going to take _years_ for King Stannis, the last hero, Azor Ahai come again, to hunt them all down and re-establish his rightful rule in every corner of the realm, marking the beginning of the new age. _Everything is well_, Melisandre mused, contemplating the beauty of the landscape of ice.

_Why am I then so afraid?_

The cage to bring men up the Wall clanked in her proximity, interrupting the vivid stream of her thoughts and memories. Lord Pomegranate, Bowen Marsh, approached her with caution, bowing with utmost humility.

"Lady Melisandre, the wildlings are ready to depart," he said.

"You have done well," she praised him, closing her eyes. The ruby was pulsating around her neck and welcome warmth seeped into her body from its steady motion.

"Most of them are more than willing to leave the hospitality of the Castle Black," Lord Pomegranate stated the obvious. "Their hero, Lord Snow, is gone. Only the Thenns will stay."

It was most amusing, Melisandre reflected. Since they had murdered him, all the black brothers who did it now respectfully referred to Jon as Lord Snow.

"We have the marriage of Alys Karstark to the Magnar of Thenn to thank for that," she decided to say something self-evident as well. Small talk made men more at ease in her presence, and she still needed Bowen Marsh for a while. The old man smiled, feeling important and flattered in his scarce wisdom, not corresponding to his advancing age.

There were no guards on top of the Wall during daytime. The Night's Watch has become little and less, even with the new wildling recruits who were about to abandon their posts and return to the no man's land where they came from.

_Guards are no longer necessary,_ Melisandre was convinced.

"The flames of R'hllor will watch over the Castle Black as soon as the wildlings go back where they belong," she said. "It will satisfy the hunger of the Great Other. And his terrible pale walking servants will no longer be able to cross it."

Too many had already sneaked in the Seven Kingdoms, like frost on the hair and the garments of the wildlings. They would come to life in the woods beneath the Wall when it was sufficiently cold. Most wandered south, afraid of the wrath of the Lord of Light if they had stayed near the Wall.

"The night is dark and full of terrors," Lord Marsh echoed her unspoken thought. He was the nine hundred and ninety ninth elected Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and he was shaking with palpable fear. It was not clear what he feared more: the Others, the ghost of Lord Snow, or the Lady Melisandre.

And once the wildlings had left, they would only have to wait. King Stannis would return victorious after taking Winterfell and making it the royal seat for several months. The castle was renewed and fortified against any new enemy that might come from the south. All the northern lords except old Lord Manderly were now sworn to him, and he was going to win the allegiance of the White Harbor soon enough, as the fires had shown.

King Stannis could field enough men to hold the entire north. He was going to vanquish the Great Other, with his flaming sword, Lightbringer, and then he was going to ride south to unite his kingdoms under the fiery banner of R'hllor, Lord of Light.

With an unsure hand, Melisandre rekindled the embers of the fire the night guards had abandoned before dawn. It was still fuming imperceptibly next to the path she walked on, strewn with broken stones. Behind her, under her warm feet, the ice kept melting and a small stream of water trickled slowly, dripping down the Wall towards the lands belonging to the Great Other. _For now._ Light broadened in the faraway east. The Wall spread further over the lands than the weak dawn of the new day, shorter than the previous one.

She needed to take another look at the future.

Melisandre tried to forget the times when her faith wavered and when all she could see in the fires was snow. Now she understood that as well. It was in its white depths that poor Jon Snow had found his grave. It had snowed that night. _And the wolves were so many._ Thinking about the injustice of it all almost made her cry. Almost. Just like when she was a little girl in Asshai, very many years ago, much more than her body would show to ignorant onlookers.

The shadow of the fire she revived danced and turned thicker, casting an image on the ice parapet behind it. The fool of Princess Shireen sang in one of the towers, from the top of his lungs, that had once been drowned under the sea. "_The shadows come to dance, my lady..."_ Patchface would not stop roaring. The merciless wind swirled and took the faint sound all the way towards them. "_Under the sea, all shadows are green, I know, I know, oh, I know!"_

"We can't stop him, my lady," Lord Marsh excused himself. "I know you have asked for it, but short of killing him, there's nothing we can do. And Princess Shireen is very fond of him."

"She should be in Nightfort, with her mother," Melisandre said.

"They are both eager to see His Grace King Stannis come back," Lord Marsh sometimes had an answer for everything.

"Never mind," Melisandre waved her worries away. She stared attentively deeper into the flames, as they slowly picked up, licking the air in tongues of red, orange, and yellow. In time, she would look at the shadow they were casting. With the certainty of knowledge, she smiled.

"We shall have need of the ice cells," she said. "We will be having guests soon."

"The arrangements will be made, lady," Lord Marsh said immediately, bowing again. The man courtesied far too much in Melisandre's opinion.

Only then did she dare look in the darkness created by the light.

The shade of her small fire took a shape of a beast with jagged teeth and a long snout. Sharp spikes adorned its body. The dragon was angry, and hers to command. _Soon, the power of R'hllor shall be revealed to all._

The Age of Fire was about to begin.

**The greenseer**

Floating on his back, the greenseer took great care to avoid one of the logs pretending to drift gently down the stream. Stale water had its uses but his favourite bathing place was not filled by it. He knew that the impertinent log did not fall from a tree. It rather possessed a scaled green and yellow skin and sharp black teeth of a lizard lion. _Black, like dragon's teeth and bones,_ he thought. He could still try and catch it. Their meat was delicious. He had seen forty name days but his hunting skills had never gone to rust. His net, knife and spear rarely failed him. Food was scarce in a bog, and all of its dwellers learned how to hunt. He should return for his weapons.

_Not on this day_, he decided.

He was naked and not in a mood to hunt, nor to enjoy the company of a lizard lion for much longer. Flowers would be much better. Soon, he lost the animal, plunging in a maze of river weeds below the surface, growing from the soft treacherous soil which was neither firm land nor a body of water. Afterwards, he left the shallows to dive once again, this time deep, in the middle of the stream, to see if he could still hold his breath as long as in his youth. Satisfied, he popped out on the other side of the current, right where the white and pink water lilies grew, one larger than the other, blossoming in the autumn sun. They smelled of life and of still water. A welcome sight for his watchful eyes, a soft ointment for his hardened senses.

The green of the water was as he liked it, not too warm, and not too cold either. Soon, it would cool down much more. For now it was more pleasant than the air above it, which turned chilly months ago, smelling strongly of autumn and of winter rains.

His dreams were many and different of late, not making much sense. They showed great hosts moving over all the known lands, towers falling, towers melting, an enemy of ice, and an enemy of …fire.

With even strokes, he avoided a tiny islet on his right. There was a nest of wild ducks in a thicket of loose dry branches under a young tree. They didn't want men around when the mother duck was brooding. The tepid water felt wonderful on bare skin and hard working muscle. His limbs flexed in harmonious movement, taking him back up the stream. His swim was ending. It was time.

He was one with the green of the water and the shore was getting nearer.

_I had never thought to outlive any of my children,_ he thought bitterly, remembering the dream he was unfortunate enough to understand. Clear as sunrise, it told that his son would not live to father sons of his own. He would have given anything if it hadn't been green. As always, he knew that it has been.

Grey-green water, colour of his late wife's eyes, bent and rippled under the force of his short wiry arms. His own had always been the colour of moss, like the eyes of their only son. He never told his children before they departed that he had shared more than the eye colour with his boy. And his son was braver than he had ever been. Jojen decided to embrace his gift and go to Winterfell, rather than cower in the marshes, and hide.

The greenseer had done his best to quench his gift, and for about twenty years it was nearly gone. Until an image came unbidden in his sleep, strong as the thunder lightning savaging the bogs, setting the old tree trunks on fire. He saw a young warrior bleeding in the snow, the so-called bastard of his liege and friend, Ned Stark. A red sorceress bent over him, eyes filled with pity. And the greenseer's guts had filled with rebellion, and loathing. It was not fair.

Then, the red eyes of the direwolf shone among the trees. The green shade of a dragon covered the frozen sky and his soul rejoiced. He saw it all, and the red woman did not. Or else, how could she be so calm? Her mistake gave him hope. So when he had woken, he raced over the abandoned courtyards to the heart tree in the middle of the night, and he looked deep. He looked south and he saw two more dragons, one white and one black, one ensnared and one free, flying home over the Narrow Sea. He looked north and he saw a wildling king reading a false letter of the cursed red woman in the godswood of Winterfell... The greenseer whispered to him how, unknowingly, it was all truth what the letter had said, all that, and more... The man donned a dirty white cloak, jumped on a saddle of a heavy brown horse and galloped south. He did not hear the tree with his ears, but he had heard it with his heart.

The greenseer then employed all of his eyes and ears, charging them to watch over the causeway. The men and women of the swamps had patiently waited for the wildling to arrive. They brought him to the greenseer unharmed through the gods-forsaken quicksands of their domain. There, the wildling king learned the entire truth, or as much of it as the greenseer had known for certain in the world where the grass was growing. For some of his dreams the greenseer always kept to himself. Not willing to dishearten or cheat others by the imperfection of his seeing, he carried the burden of half clear hints and incomplete knowledge all alone.

Once, before his children were born, there were seven against three, and only the greenseer now lived to tell the tale of a high tower in Dorne, of a young woman who died and a child who lived to be the young warrior bleeding in the snow.

He had recently seen that woman again in his dreams; older, alive, returning to the north she came from at the forefront of a large host, and holding a hand of a mournful silver-haired man. A man who looked broken, but was mended on the inside. But those visions were too dream-like to believe in. _Only the terrible ones have ever come true._

There were seven against three and only one was left living, to mourn and to remember.

The greenseer paddled arms and legs up and down the stream, reluctant to return. His fear and despair ran much deeper than the water. He strayed a bit from his path, cutting through the unmoving stinky ponds where the flies buzzed, and the dark red irises grew, darker than blood spilled. He swam and he swam some more, until he was tired and dizzy, and the only way to go was back.

He relaxed when the castle came into view, shimmering green with the last light of the season. He'd always liked to go swimming very early in the morning. The land the castle stood on was sailing softly with the current, never quite in the same place, but its people could always find it, knowing what they were looking for. No one else could. Not even the Others, whom his eyes and ears had seen hovering south, through the outskirts of the bogs and down the causeway. There were fortunately not so many who somehow crossed the Wall. His guards were smart enough not to let themselves be seen, but they still grew very frightened in their hearts when they had to count the white walkers. All of them were much too young to remember the Long Night, and none of them had the gift to see the terrible past, the ever changing present, and the never certain future.

He floated on his back again to see the castle better. There was no other sight on earth he would ever love more. Tall and graceful, his home spread all over the length of the island, rising from the waterways like a large wobbly hill saturated with greenery. The chant of frogs could be heard in the shallows bordering the muddy stretches of low land. They sang and sang some more, unaware of their peril to be served as a main dish at the last harvest feast.

Made of bark, and leaf, and the smell of living things, the castle rested quietly on its unsteady ground. They steered the floating island here before the winter, to the part of the bog with faster currents which never froze, so that it would always be on the move.

The first fence surrounding the castle was of reed, higher than the tallest of men, planted carefully over the years where it didn't grow by itself. The second one was higher, a long circle of willows, some weeping, and some not. High water grass, similar to reed yet different, green and broadleaved, overgrew the spaces between the trees. The third fence was a wall, made of unmortared stone on the bottom, and of timber on the upper levels. Hardened clay filled the holes between the stones and beams. The masonry and the wood had been skilfully covered with bark and leaf over the ages, so that the castle would not look as if it had been built by human hand. And perchance it was not. It might have been a marvel of nature just as well. The rotting wood, the crumbling clay and the loose stones were replaced at need. But the foundations of the castle were as old as Winterfell, at least as old as the First Men.

Or older.

The iron for the portcullis was brought from the barrowlands a few hundred years ago. Its bars were forged into a curved plant-like pattern. Real vines crept all over it, so that the tendrils of heavy metal appeared to be thick dark brown stems of the grapevine. The legend said that a hundred men and women worked for a hundred days to finish it. One hundred was a sacred number. Yet the knowledge why that was so had been forgotten after the gates had been made. The greenseer wished to know why, and perhaps, one day before all would be over, he would find out.

Inside, behind the gates, there were three courtyards, twelve rounded wooden towers, and a large stony keep. All the pillars in the spacious halls and vaulted porticos were shaped like human figures, small like children, but endowed with wizened, clever eyes. Half had knives and bows, and the other half instruments; a fiddle, drum or woodharp. On rare occasions that they received guests from the south of the Seven Kingdoms, the greenseer would tell them that the figures likely represented the faces of the Seven. They did not. And all those who may have known the meaning of the faces had been lost to time.

It was amazing how many visitors believed him. The men so often saw what they wanted to see and not what was right in front of them, poking into their eyes.

From without, the island looked deceptively small, but on the inside, the castle could easily receive five hundred people while offering them the comfort due to guests. In case of dire need, and without any regard for courtesy, it could house up to two thousand or more, giving them both shelter and food. Part of the crop was set aside for that purpose in summer, in full knowledge that the castle would be overcrowded every winter.

In the innermost of the three courtyards there was the godswood. Its heart tree was a snow white weirwood with few slender limbs and a modest canopy of leaves. The branches needed to be cut every now and then when the tree threatened to overgrow its place. But its trunk was as large as a house and its roots ran deep. The legend said it were the roots of the heart tree itself that held the castle together. They kept the island from separating into smaller pieces of land and drifting apart. The eyes of the heart tree were grave, the maw gaping open so wide that a small man like him could easily fit inside and become one with the faces of the old gods. That was where he went to take his look on the night that he acknowledged his gift again. Within the weirwood, it was suffocatingly hot. Even now when the water was so much warmer than the air, which had turned sharp and bristle, biting the eyes and the skin, as winter drew nearer.

A nest of kingfishers, by a tunnel in the mud on the edge of the firm land, or what passed for it in the bogs, marked the entrance point on the waterfront. One of the birds cried in the nearest tree, its song ringing like harsh sudden laughter. Most of the birds were now gone, though. Flown away to the Summer Isles or further across the sea. They would return come spring.

If spring ever came again.

The reeds bent and separated gently as he swam in through the long narrow passage of water. Still in the distance, he could see the wooden piers. As many as four scores of low longboats were getting ready to depart. They were being manned, cleaned, painted, pushed in or out of water. Two men waited for him there. He could not yet make out their faces from afar. But they held what he had asked for, a set of bright green garments ready at hand, scraped clean like the boats; neither of them used in a very long time. It was the first time in many years he was going to dress in green and admit to his folk what very few among them still remembered, the truth of what he was.

A greenseer like his son after him, a greenseer who refused to look and to see for countless years, ever since he took the hand of his wife in marriage before the heart tree. For the images he had seen before that, just like those he saw now, were too magnificent. In his visions, greatness came mingled with cruelty and grief.

All he had ever wanted was to live like an ordinary man for the rest of his days. Like most men, he was not to have his wish.

In despair, he dived again, to inhale the familiar smell of his home through the veil of water. He slid forward through it, slithering over the sandy bottom like an eel. His eyes were open and he moved through thick yellow and brown curtain of mud his body had lifted, saturated with life. A fish swam by, brown and slippery.

When he finally dared dive out, he saw the castle in all its majesty. No longer a mere glimpse, it towered over him. The weeds whispered, the reeds swayed, the willows wept. The remaining birds kept laughing. The bark and leaf hiding the stone rustled to him. The boats were being fitted with long poles and oars. The mudmen were going to rise, now, at the end of time. Courage woke in his heart, swelling with the joy of home coming.

It was there, and it will always be, even when he would be gone.

The Greywater Watch.


	2. Chapter 2

My thanks to TopShelfCrazy who betaed this chapter.  
>There are angels and there are beta readers, and I am glad for their help.<p>

Thank you to two guests who left a review on the first chapter of this story. Please let me know what you think about the continuation.

**Jon**

_And now your watch has ended,_ he thought. On four white furry legs he padded softly toward the corpse of a man wrapped in a black cloak of the Night's Watch. _A dead crow._ A black stain soiling the pristine whiteness of the land, spilled like dirt under the canopy of red leaves and sullen tree-eyes, always watching.

The wolf hadn't stopped moving since he had sneaked out of Castle Black. The careless, frightened men in black had never seen him. They must have thought he was just another shadow cast by their torches, shifting alongside the inner walls of the ice tunnel under the Wall. He had followed them from a distance, first through the Wall and then across the haunted forest. The snow was crispy and fresh, just fallen, crumbling under his paws like crunchy icing on a cake. He liked it that way. He was never far from the funeral procession, treading after the black brotherhood and the red woman who smelled of danger. Thankfully, none of them lingered for long in the grove of the wooden gods, not having a taste for their silent company.

When all had left, he plodded forward, sniffing. Soon, he would see the dead man's face. He knew the weirwood grove where the man in front of him had been brought to die. It was the place where he had sworn an oath to become the light that brings the dawn. _I'm the horn that wakes the sleepers,_ he remembered_._ He vowed many other things besides. It has become difficult to remember all of them in his new animal mind. In his throat he felt the urge to howl and melt into the woods. Unattached. Free.

His ears pricked. _Why?_ There hasn't been any game in this part of the woods for months. Only blue soldier pine needles remained under the snow and on the trees. Needles and then the red leaves, redder than blood. The green leaves were rotten and gone. Forgotten until spring. The lifeless creatures he could not eat were nearing the grove, on two or on four paws, but they were not yet close enough to put him so much on edge.

He smelled a leg of the man lying in front of him. The scent was familiar. He sat on his haunches and howled, not advancing any further. There was no moon above the trees, but howling felt tremendously exhilarating and most proper. An animal dirge, for a fallen man. The wolf wailed to the sky. It had turned dark green and bronze above him, where it should have been dark blue or black, criss-crossed by the stars.

He prowled to the man's face and nuzzled it. _It can't be,_ he thought on four defeated paws. _It's me, and I'm dead. My watch has ended. I'm trapped like Orell was in his eagle, only that I'm in Ghost._ Orell was the wildling he had killed ages ago, when he was still a boy. Before he was elected to the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. Before he killed that boy to let the man be born as Maester Aemon had advised him.

He looked down at his living, lithe, four-legged body, and checked once more that all his paws were white. It was better to be sure he was in Ghost than to see a pair of black hands and to know that his eyes turned blue. He wished there was a lake to see his image in the water and know for certain. But the lakes he had visited in the lands beyond the Wall were all further to the east, deeper in the haunted forest, in the long leagues of white waste between the Castle Black and the Shadow Tower.

He licked his own man-body lying in front of him. It smelled of death. It was not yet completely cold, but it soon would be. Red direwolf's eyes gazed peacefully at the weirwoods. All the faces were different, just like Sam Tarly of Horn Hill, his fat friend, had noticed when they had said their words. There were nine of them. All the trees were serious, angry, or wearing sad smiles. There wasn't a single one cheerful, or laughing. They stared at the wolf and the dead man with solemn eyes.

Then, the green and bronze shade grew larger in the sky and the wolf felt _warmer_ amidst desolation of winter, where no warmth had ever been. He tried hard to arch his head backward to contemplate the sky, but a great white direwolf could not stretch his neck as far back as a man could.

Green droplets snowed from the sky, green crystals of strange beauty. He wondered if they would melt on his tongue like snow if he drank them. He wondered if they were demons come from afar, from the sunset sea or from the Shadow Lands he believed existed somewhere in the world he would never see. Although he couldn't remember where exactly; the lessons of his childhood lost in the haze of his newly gained ferociousness. The green petals landed on the throat, the belly and between the shoulders of his dead man-body, not of the wolf. The last ones touched the man's chest. They fell slowly, hovering in the cold air, weightless. And where they missed their human target and touched the snow, the white blanket gave way. It was burnt, scourged to the brown soil. A thin layer of bubbles frothed to the surface as if the water were boiling.

The wolf instincts urged him to leave, because the walking dead and their masters were about to arrive. He drew a sharp breath and bared his teeth to the gloom of the forest. The trees lay like heavy burden on a mantle of snow and ice. He could _feel_ the smell of death, smell of rot, and the smell of... nothingness from the masters of the dead, which was the ugliest stench of all. But the man inside the wolf yearned to linger for another look. Just one more look at the miracle. The green crystals landed on the ugly gashes on his dead _or was it merely dying?_ man's body. They seeped through the furs and leathers and the black wool of his tunic like blazing fire. Wherever they fell, they seared the blood and torn flesh. Blood that was frozen and ruby hard seemed warm and liquid again. The skin started knitting together under the crystals, visibly so, faster than it had any right to do. Both Maester Aemon in Castle Black and Maester Luwin in Winterfell would have told him such a thing was not possible.

The wolf prepared to run away from the cold wind that was rising. The wights would be too many to draw away by tooth and claw, he sensed. His intuition rarely failed him.

The wounds were almost vanished when the wolf dashed forward, away from the enemy marching through the dark. He soon lost sight of the weirwood trees and their unhappy faces.

And then ran straight into a pair of large, unfamiliar claws that had been waiting for him behind the line of trees. All four white legs left the ground, grabbing the empty air like odd furry paddles, twisting, twitching, useless. The wolf howled in terror, forcing the man-spirit in him out of his writhing body.

The moon rose in the night sky, golden yellow as a wheel of ripe cheese.

xxxx

Jon opened his eyes and saw a starry sky above, through the thick red crowns of nine white trees. There was the Ice Dragon and the star the wildlings called the Thief. He could not remember how he called it. How the men of the Seven Kingdoms called it. _A wanderer, was it? _he thought. _You know nothing, Jon Snow, _a voice spoke in his memory.

_I don't,_ he couldn't agree more with Ygritte. The woman he had loved and left. And then she left him and went where he could not follow. If he died, could he see her again? He didn't know, but it was a good thing to look forward to.

His chest hurt and he had trouble breathing. He thought he could hear giant wings, flapping. _Another eagle,_ he thought, _a green one. Can there be green eagles?_ he wondered. _Dark green like the haunted forest or... bronze like the armour of the Thenns_? He was exhausted and dragged a tired hand to his face. The skin felt clammy and cold. The sky above him screeched, faintly, exhaling puffs of timid smoke. _No more scars, please. And I'd like to keep both eyes if possible._

_Ghost, to me!_ he tried to call for help, spotting a white tail disappearing behind an even whiter tree. No sound came from his mouth, dried from thirst and the loss of blood. The direwolf did not return. He managed to turn sideways, only a tiny bit. Avidly, he drank his fill of snow. Moving had not been the wisest thing to do. The pain in his chest and belly grew, drowning him like a torrent breaking a dam that laid on its path.

Jon was forced to close his eyes.

If he didn't know any better, he would think that he was flying.

xxxx

Jon woke with a start and sat up on a bed made of old turf. He pulled a snow bear pelt tightly around him. It was serving him as a blanket and it had seen better days. He rubbed his eyes to chase the dream away. Every night he dreamed the sky of green and bronze and every day he woke with the same questions.

_How did we come here?_

It must have been three months he had lived in this cave. The mouth gaped in front, with the terrible grey sea and a ruined human settlement lying many feet below from where he dwelled. He shared the stony hall with Ghost, three more men and a scrawny girl child. There must have been at least three hundred caves of many different sizes. They were connected with ropes and primitive woven ladders one of the wildling clans provided. At night, they would be pulled inside.

Hardhome was a difficult place to settle in. Of roughly ten thousand people that Mother Mole had brought there, little more than one third remained. It was hard to tell. The wildlings would not let themselves be counted, and there was no one who would count them anyway.

The rest had become corpses floating in the water, or wights lurking in the darkness of the wood behind the high cliff with its caves. A hundred had been taken by a slaver ship to Braavos across the shivering sea. Many caves were thus dark and empty, their fires put out by the whistling wind. Some of the surviving wildlings believed that the unstoppable noise of the sea, day and night, was the wail of the restless souls of the dead, unable to find peace. Others didn't believe in anything after what they had been through. Not even the old gods had power to protect their people from the evil which had woken behind the Wall. Or if they did, as some still hoped for, they had not shown it yet.

Jon was the last one awake. Routinely, he checked that their rope was already out and that it was not broken. It was in order. Every morning, he would climb down to the settlement. Ghost would return to him after the night hunt and together they would stare at the stormy, foaming sea, hoping to glimpse a ship. No ship ever came. There were no sails to be seen on the horizon, either black from Eastwatch by the Sea, or white, from the Free Cities. Nor a simple long wooden craft with no sails from Skagos, as the wildlings described the looks of those, uneager to see them appear. Going to Skagos could mean becoming another man's supper as far as Jon understood. There were members of the ice river cannibal clans from far north in the caves as well, but they were too few to cause trouble. So they chose to behave. They ate the same food as anyone else. A few tried eating the dead, but the bodies were poisonous and they died as well. After that, all men, cannibals or not, stuck to the provisions they had brought, distributed with iron discipline. The supplies would last long because their numbers had so severely diminished.

_If you showed the same discipline in battle, good people,_ Jon thought, _Lord Stannis would not have broken you._ Then maybe Jon would not be murdered by his own sworn brothers. But he might have ended up murdered by the wildlings, so he guessed it was all the same. He didn't think Mance would have spared him if he had won the battle for the Wall.

"Jon," the girl child called from her small bundle of furs. She was not yet two years old so she had no name. Or maybe she was old enough, but her parents were both dead, so no one knew for certain. Dead children could float in the poisoned waters and wells below the caves as good as any man or woman. Jon thus learned the wisdom of not naming the children too early. One never knew which would live and which would die.

"I'll make your porridge, don't fret," Jon told the orphan girl. She had thick, dirty black hair, and she reminded him of his sister Arya when she was barely more than a babe.

It was best not to think of Arya and what she may have endured married to the Bastard of Bolton. At least she was most likely away from him now if one could believe the bastard's letter. Jon was afraid that if Stannis lived, he would just marry her off to someone else as soon as he could, but there was nothing he could do about it from Hardhome. _Arya will not be pleased_, he was certain. _She'll not like it at all._

The new day was promising to be much the same as all the previous ones. And a bit shorter than all the days that preceded it. _Winter is coming. Winter is come._ Be as it may, he tried to have hope, as he looked for the bag of oats and dried nuts for the girl's porridge. He would go out, do his watch, look for sails, go hunting for food with Ghost in the few hours of daylight, and go back to the cave to sleep. Maybe Ghost would climb in with him. The wolf would occasionally accept to be rope bound so that Old Garth and Jon could pull him up to the cave.

The day lasted only for a few hours, and they didn't keep watch at night. They would withdraw inside the cursed caves, roll up the ropes and the ladders, and keep the fires burning. When no one was looking and when he would feel particularly alone, Jon would stare at his wounds for hours and wonder if he was dead or alive. He would stare at his hands expecting them to turn black at any moment, but the only injury he could see would be the old burn scars on his sword hand.

The wounds stopped hurting weeks ago, but the treason never did. _Daggers in the dark._ Lady Melisandre had seen that good enough. If only she had seen other things half as well! Then it would have been Arya, and not Alys Karstark on the Wall. He wondered if Arya would then one day have to marry the new Magnar of Thenn as Alys did. Somehow he thought she may have liked that better than a lordling Stannis or gods forbid his queen or grieving widow, Selyse, were likely to choose for her. He wondered if Mance Rayder was alive or if he had died in the cage where the Bastard of Bolton had put him for saving his sister.

_Knives in the dark._ It was his brothers who killed Jon Snow. This hurt more than his wounds ever did. He remembered Bowen Marsh stabbing him, and all the others... At least Grenn or Pyp were away, and he didn't see Satin. He hoped they wouldn't be able to do it. He hoped that the others wouldn't kill them too for being Jon's friends. Jon didn't count himself a man of the Night's Watch any longer. If you died, your watch ended, it was as simple as that. It was not his fault if he survived the murder. Jon was an orphan of everything and no one cared if he lived or died. He had no mother, he had no father, he had no siblings and no sworn brothers. There was no way he could return from Hardhome to Castle Black to claim his command, and even if he did, they would kill him again and again.

He peeked out of the cave to pick up a handful of clean snow from the craggy ends of the cliff, for the porridge. There was no milk for children in Hardhome.

While he was busy stirring the girl's meal, an old, friendly face showed up against the weak winter sun, above the stony doorstep. Mother Mole had confused, pale grey eyes, large wells of light on a chubby face of many years. She arranged her hair with frost so that it stood up in all directions, in straight thin spikes of white and grey which framed her aged face like sun rays. The icicles on her head gave her eyes a haunted, visionary expression. Jon often wondered how she slept with frozen hair, or if she had to freeze it all over again every morning. She was heavy of body yet she climbed better than his brother Bran ever did when he was still whole and had use of his legs. Mother Mole was a woods witch so maybe some demons of the forest guided her steps. The Starks kept the old gods. But the old gods never saved any of them, neither Jon's brothers, nor his father. The more Jon lived, the more he believed that the old gods were only trees. And it sounded rather stupid to pray to a plant, however majestic it might be.

"Jon," the wildling witch called him with glee, "there is a boat on the rocks below. Skagosi, by the looks of it."

"Is there?" he muttered, incredulous, finishing the porridge.

"Yes," the joy in the old woman's voice could be scooped with the spoon. "Two men in it. Old Garth was down first. He found them. Alive. Barely. But alive."

"Who are they?"

"Come down and see," she said, "one wears the cloak o'ya black brothers."

Jon was not in the mood to see a sworn brother of the Night's Watch at all.

"And the other?" he asked.

"Don't know," Mother Mole said, smiling. She had only one large tooth left in the back of her jaws. _She should make wooden ones like old Dywen, the forester_, Jon thought. "He's a few fingers short, though," the old woman explained.

"Here, girl," Jon went back into the cave and handed the porridge to the child.

"Thank you, nuncle Jon," she said.

Jon didn't listen. _A ship. No, a boat. And most likely a heap of broken wood by now._

Hardhome used to have a deep, safe harbour where even the largest ships could anchor. But it was now semi-frozen, full of mud on the bottom and corpses swimming on the surface. And the rocks under the cliff where they lived, bordering the old harbour on one side, were not a good place to dock. Not good at all.

He still climbed down after Mother Mole, giddy with nervousness and curiosity. It was a welcome change, men on the beach, after three months of being a wet nurse to the unnamed girl. The descent was steep, but it seemed to him they had made it in no time, a young man and an old woman, two grey lizards on the sharply falling mountain. _No, the lizard should be green and bronze,_ an inner voice said and he shushed it into the forbidden place in his soul where he buried his childish hopes of being his father's trueborn son, a Stark of Winterfell.

Down, next to the cold, churning sea, the two men lay together on a flat rock. They were entangled with one another in an obscene way, under thick furs and layers of black wool. Jon knew they did it for warmth during night, yet the sight still surprised him. _Satin would not be shocked._ His pretty steward at Castle Black had been a man-whore in Oldtown before he became a man of the Night's Watch.

It was Jon's cave mates who found them. Old Garth from the lands of always winter and the twins Arryk and Erryk. The twins were between ten and twelve years old. Their mother had named them after a sad song from the south she heard Mance Rayder playing on his lute. She didn't live to see the end of the journey to Hardhome, but the twins remained.

The boat was no longer seaworthy to say the least. It had broken on the rocks into many pieces. Only one piece remained solid, a large raft of beams drifting in the narrow bay under the cliff; its sail was a black cloak of the Night's Watch, hanging loose on a fragile mast made of two galley oars and some black rope. The cloaked wreck floated at the mercy of tidal waves over eight feet high, which hit the shore under Jon's feet with a powerful splatter of ice cold water and curdled foam.

"This one's a black crow," Old Garth said, poking the man with his big toe. The twins nodded. They mostly did things together.

Jon removed the furs over the man's face. His eyes were small and closed, and they would have been brown if they were open. The widow's peak on his head was sharp.

"Pyke," he breathed out.

_How did Cotter Pyke, the commander of Eastwatch by the Sea, end up washed out on this gods forsaken shore? He had been here with six ships, but he must have left this place long ago._

Both men slept like logs. Jon guessed he'd also be fast asleep if he ever braved a sea like the one they came from. It didn't look like anyone could sail over it and live.

"I told you, Lord Snow," Mother Mole said with conviction behind his back. "The ships will come."

"This is but a wreck," Jon pointed out, "and I'm a lord no longer."

Pyke was a bastard like Jon, but he was ironborn, from the Iron Islands in the sunset sea. He could probably sail before he could walk. Even so, not even the most seasoned sailor could have survived out in the stormy sea near Hardhome at the beginning of winter for very long. Eastwatch by the Sea and the island of Skagos were too far to make a crossing in a flimsy boat, even in summer. There was only one explanation; there must have been a larger vessel in the high seas in-between Hardhome, Skagos and Eastwatch whence the two men came from. _But why? Best ask them_, Jon reckoned.

"'Tis but a messenger o'them great cogs to come," Mother Mole said, pale eyes brighter than the luminous sea foam crawling to the feet of the two sleeping men. "They will not be the black galleys o'the crows, oh no!" The tide was getting higher as she spoke.

"Let's drag them further up," Jon said and started working on it. Everyone helped him. Against his will in the matter he had become an unspoken Lord of Hardhome. The wildlings firmly believed that it was his arrival what kept the wights and the Others at bay. In the last three turns of the moon no more fresh corpses filled the waters; they were infested enough as they were by the decay of those already dead.

"It's the green doorway," people whispered. Jon had never seen it so he did not know what they meant. Mother Mole had seen it, but he didn't believe her. Those people who did put their faith in the woods witch claimed a large fanciful beast, _a kraken of the air_, they said, had breathed out an invisible curtain of blessed air to veil over the end of the narrow path that connected the bottom of the cliff with the abandoned settlement and the first trees of the looming forest behind it. The woods burned that night, men told him, and the great salty waves sprayed the cliff all the way to the first caves. They must have been more than fifty feet high.

"You came to us amidst salt and smoke," Mother Mole said, bright eyes winking, as if that explained everything. "I am of a mind to make you a sword if I could only weave iron as I can weave words!"

By weaving words she meant some kind of magic Jon didn't believe in either. He came to Hardhome unarmed and he could only guess about the fate of his bastard sword. Longclaw it was called, made of Valyrian steel. It belonged to the House Mormont, but the old Lord Commander Jeor Mormont gifted it to Jon because his own son and heir had dishonoured him and fled. His former brothers didn't even leave his obsidian dagger with his body when they poked Jon with their knives.

The only thing Jon Snow could see at the spot all his latest wildling companions adored was a patch of scorched black ground that could have been thunder-struck for all he knew. The soil remained warm there, that much was true, and any snow that fell melted instantly. _Probably there is a hot spring under ground, just like in Winterfell_, Jon would think, and let the wildlings believe whatever they wanted.

The top of the cliff was broad, hanging over the long narrow bay as a large flat hat crowning the mountain of steep rock, which rose high from the angry grey waves. The topmost hundred feet of the side facing the sea had no caves. The ridge was slanted inward, from the outstanding plateau on top to the shrunken underside. The cave dwellers couldn't see exactly what was up there, on the cliff. A glimpse from the settlement, where they ventured only at daytime, told them that it was surely barren for a good league until the green of the forest resumed. No white walker or wight ever came from that direction. The wildlings assumed that the levelled upper side of the cliff must have been as full of crevices and difficult to walk on or ride over as the two craggy sides of their small bay. And that whatever unearthly powers the white walkers and their dead horses may possess, they could still not fly.

Only the crystals on Jon's wounds would make him doubt his own disbelief in the green gateway from time to time. If he didn't know any better, he would have said that his cuts had been dressed in green obsidian. It could not be. Obsidian was black. Stannis spoke of layers of green, red and purple obsidian under the walls of Dragonstone, but the island of the Targaryens was far away from the Wall. And the dragonglass, whatever its colour, was most certainly _not_ used as a poultice for wounds in the Seven Kingdoms. He had to remind himself he had crossed the end of the world and that many truths of the lands he came from did not apply north of the Wall.

They had to rouse the two men to help them up. Somehow. No one could climb the ropes and ladders with that much dead weight on their backs. And they didn't dare remove the wet layer of furs on top of them before the survivors stirred. They seemed to be somewhat dry below, and the cold in Hardhome had become such that venturing out in anything less than furs meant illness and certain death. It was better in the caves, but they were far beneath them now.

Jon shook the man he didn't recognise, the one with shortened fingers on one hand. The tiny stumps were old and neat, cut with precision, he noticed. He could have been as old as his father if Lord Eddard Stark had still been among the living. "You'll have to walk, whoever you are," he murmured.

The older man listened. "Where are we?" he asked with his eyes closed. The hair on his head used to be brown, but now it was thin, soft and gentle, as a hair of a newborn babe. Jon had an impression he knew who he was. Still he could not join the weakened man in front of him with any name and title in his memories.

"Hardhome," Old Garth answered in Jon's stead. "And damn lucky to be here with the charm of the weather we were having if ya know what I mean..."

"I thought I knew a lot," the fingerless man said. "It appears I was mostly wrong."

"Snow!" Cotter Pyke said brusquely. He must have noticed Jon's disapproving stare at the two wretched men embracing. "Would that my lord of onions were a wench, but when we go ranging warm is warm. -My lord!" he added as an afterthought, coming to his senses and remembering his courtesies. _Pyke is alive and well. Good_, Jon thought.

"You led the ranging to over here? Where are the others? Did they all-" Cotter Pyke couldn't finish his outburst.

"It's not that simple," Jon said in a more unfriendly tone than he intended. He was most unwilling to discuss the matter of his murder and mysterious arrival to Hardhome in front of any wildlings. _It is my shame,_ he thought. _Not theirs. I was not prudent in my_ _actions and I earned the wrath of my brothers, just or not._

He didn't believe their anger was just, but it was easier to think that it was. Just like it was sometimes easier to imagine that his mother had died in childbed rather than to accept that she had most likely abandoned him to his fate. The simple truth was, his father was dead, and he never met his mother.

"Look, Lord Davos, that's Jon Snow!" Pyke's insolent voice brought Jon back to present. The ironborn shook his companion under furs with great enthusiasm. "The Bastard of Winterfell and the Lord Commander of the Watch."

"I have heard much about you, Lord Snow, when I was in Eastwatch," Lord Davos put in, uncertain.

"Doubtless you did," Jon said bitterly. _That I'm a turncloak and a warg for certain. What else did they say?_ "You are Stannis's Hand," he finally remembered who the man must be, clear as weak daylight.

"I was," Davos agreed. "Davos Seaworth was my name. Don't know if I'm still anyone's Hand..." He glanced at the uninviting rocks of the bay.

"The boy wasn't with us, was he?" the fingerless lord asked of Erryk and Arryk. The brothers didn't look anything alike, and Jon suspected Arryk was a girl. She only dressed as a boy so that she wouldn't get stolen. Given the splendid choice among the ugly and randy men in the caves, most of them at least twice her age, Jon was not surprised by her behaviour. Many young people did not survive the trip through the wilderness, and many of those who did died in Hardhome or became slaves in Braavos.

"We was found no one," Erryk said. "T'was you two, no more," Arryk clumsily finished the thought

"Which boy?" Jon asked with mounting apprehension.

"The little lord of Winterfell," Lord Seaworth said. He clutched the furs together and grabbed the skin under his neck for something that wasn't there. "Your half brother. Rickon Stark."


	3. Chapter 3

A huge thanks to Dr. Holland who betaed this chapter

xx

**Tyrion**

He lived in the rooms of a dead man.

When the tall, handsome, blue bearded Tyroshi sellsword came to fetch him, flashing a golden tooth, Tyrion was doing his best, or his worst, to wrap himself in a vivid green coloured tokar with amethyst fringes all by himself. There were no slaves any longer in the freed city of Meereen. _And there have never been squires, _he thought, wrestling with the enemy

made of fabric and wondering what had become of Pod, his squire. _Maybe he found his tongue when he didn't have to serve me anymore._

When he was done, he felt like one of the seventy seven courses on Joffrey's wedding feast. A green slimy one. _A dwarf roasted in a crust of peas. Juicy. Wouldn't my sister enjoy that? Like she savoured the boar that had killed her husband..._The only advantage of the horrendous outfit he wore, a must in the fashion of the Slaver's Bay, was that its colour fitted at least one of his two mismatched eyes. The other eye, the black one, gazed at the sellsword suspiciously. _See, father, I'll never trust anyone again, isn't that what you wanted? _He fervently hoped that his late father was enjoying an eternal, unpleasant tour through seven hells.

"Petitioners," Daario Naharis announced with utmost boredom in his voice. _So he didn't come to kill me, this time. _"From Asshai, this time," the sellsword echoed Tyrion's thought. "Lacquered masks and all." Naharis was familiar. He sounded almost as arrogant as his brother Jaime. He only lacked a pair of mischievous green eyes and an evil twin sister.

Tyrion nodded obediently and waddled toward the stairs. _Fabled Asshai by the Shadow. Why can't the masked devils leave our absent queen be? Reconquering Westeros and recapturing stolen dragons won't be done fast. _Blessedly, he reached the audience chamber without toppling over his tokar.

A large, simple table stood in the centre of the hall, an invention of Ser Barristan the Bold, to seat the queen's councillors. There were fewer than they were before. When Queen Daenerys sailed for, or rather, flew to Westeros a few weeks ago, three of her commanders followed her. Ser Barristan Selmy, the commander and the only member of her Kingsguard; Grey Worm, the leader of the Unsullied, and an evil creature who went by the name of Brown Ben Plumm, the captain of a sellswords company called the Second Sons. Tyrion had been a second son all his life, but a member of that illustrious company only for a fortnight.

Being born a dwarf sometimes had its advantages. Rarely, but still. And Tyrion was intent to use the few that there were. After all, Meereen had sufficient dogs to sustain the eating habits of the local population. In the first days after the victory, Tyrion found a tame furry stray dog for Penny. It was yellow and spotted. The dwarf girl cried tears of joy. She immediately took to practising her jousting dog act while the paymaster of the Second Sons and a few other members of the company watched in amazement. Tyrion used the time to sneak in the company coffers, as a twisted little monster of a dwarf he was, and take back all the letters by which he gave money to the sellswords, and lands and lordship to Brown Ben Plumm.

He only left Ben a letter for his bride in Westeros, Sansa Stark, testifying he had been already married, to a crofter's daughter called Tysha, who still lived as far as he knew. He hoped it was enough to secure an annulment of the marriage his father had imposed on them both. _Father, I will ruin all your designs, to the very last one. Even if the wife you found for me was a beautiful child I was attracted to before she slew my nephew, Joffrey, and left me to pay for it. _Then he scribbled a note for Plumm informing him that he might have his reward back if he took good care of his letter in Westeros.

When he rejoined Penny, the girl was breathless from jousting. She kissed him on his cheek and asked him to find a pig as well so that they could perform the act together. Tyrion didn't think so. He felt ashamed because he did not want the girl, and she seemed to harbour some genuine affection for him. _How can anyone love a dwarf if we cannot find love in our hearts for each other? _Yet it was so, and lies would not make it any different. Tyrion wanted a big girl, with black hair and blue eyes. _Tysha. Where do whores go? _Despite being small, stunted and twisted.

Soon, when Tyrion became more acquainted with the local customs, he secured a position for Penny in the Temple of the Graces. It was a good place for her, a huge brick building with its grand domes housing so many women. Although a girl grown, Penny became one of the White Graces, as if she were a child. And Tyrion didn't think she would rise high on a path to grace. The ascension included being a Red Grace, what Westerosi would call simply a whore. A profession Penny was not meant for. Be as it may, she was safe. It was all that Tyrion could have done for her.

Another girl woke Tyrion from the swamp of his thoughts. A young scribe wise beyond her years, Missandei, spoke with the queen's voice in her absence. Daario Naharis, the captain of Stormcrows, Hero of the Unsullied, Skahaz mo Kandaq called the Shavepate, the bald commander of the Brazen Beasts, perfumed seneschal Reznak mo Reznak, one of the Blue Graces who survived the pale mare pestilence during siege and Tyrion himself completed the tableau around Ser Barristan's high table.

Tyrion had become an unofficial Hand of the Queen. Or rather her Foot as he liked to joke in barely a week he served Daenerys Stormborn in person. The office of the Hand was unknown to Meereen and, besides, it brought bad memories. Of his sweet sister and his lord father, both wishing him dead, mostly for a crime of being a dwarf. It brought souvenirs of the spacious set of rooms he used to enjoy in the Tower of the Hand in Red Keep, after two Hands who preceded him, Lord Jon Arryn and Lord Eddard Stark, had been murdered. Tyrion would have been the third one on that count if Jaime did not come and set him free, in payment of a debt that could never be settled. _Wherever whores go, _his father had said and he had died for it. Jaime was still alive, and Tyrion sometimes wondered how he was faring. _I'll never see him again._

Inheriting a set of rooms from another dead man in Meereen was endearing. It made Tyrion feel almost at home.

_Almost, but not quite. I have no home. And if I ever had one, it would be in a crofter's cottage. _He tried his best not to think about the crofter's daughter. _We were thirteen, for the seven heavens sake._ It was a lifetime ago and Tysha was most likely dead no matter what he had written in his letter for Sansa.

Tyrion's rooms were on the second level of the pyramid counted from the top. They had once belonged to a dead Dornish prince. A would-be dragontamer. _Not the brightest idea, _Tyrion thought. He had read all that there was to read about dragons in Westeros and he would never attempt such a thing. Prince Quentyn's bones were on their way home, on board of one of the captured Volantene ships that had accompanied the queen.

"Your Magnificences," Quaithe, the masked woman leading the Asshai embassy, spoke with conviction, although she flattered the councillors to foster her cause. As far as Tyrion had learned only a ruler should have been accorded a style of magnificence, worship or radiance in Meereen. Radiance was Tyrion's favourite. He found it the most ridiculous of all.

"It is past time that Her Radiance Queen Daenerys travels to Asshai," Quaithe announced as if she had read Tyrion's thoughts. "Or she will surely perish in great pain with all her children in Westeros."

"The queen shall decide on this when she returns," Missandei ruled, with Daenerys's former lover at her right side. Tyrion was seated to her left. The lacquered masks were not a new thing. They were presenting themselves every day in the last week with the same plea. They were two weeks too late. The queen had embarked on a ship before they arrived. Tyrion stifled a yawn. "These ones thank you for your concern for the queen," Missandei said sweetly.

_Go away, _Tyrion thought. People were sometimes so slow to understand. And he was of a mind to go to Zahrina's and watch naked freedmen and freedwomen slashing at each other with knives. The mortal art of the poor had become his favourite pastime since his arrival to Meereen. Especially because he no longer visited whores. And he still didn't know where the whores went. They could have made into an eunuch of late for all he cared.

There were two masked women and two men, all clad in red and green. "One for each dragon", they said. There were only three living dragons in the world, Tyrion knew, so their count was as queer as the four of them. The Asshai'i seemed very tenacious and undeterred by the constant polite refusal of their pleas.

"Soon it will be too late," Quaithe said. "Send one among yourselves if you cannot reach the queen. One who has seen the dragons."

_This is new._ _Maybe the petitioners are becoming desperate after all_, Tyrion thought with derision.

He had seen the living dragons only very briefly. He was a foot soldier during the great and short battle for Meereen, the smallest and the humblest Second Son. Yet it was his idea how the company should best change sides to be on the winning tide in the end. The Second Sons placed themselves in the vanguard of the Yunkai reckless attack on Meereen. They marched _against_ the ranks of the Unsullied, or it looked that way. Then they joined the queen's army and marched back on her enemies. In the end they walked over the corpses of the Yunkai'i slavers who had been paying their wages until that moment.

The dragons did the rest, flying to the thick of the battle, burning their mother's enemies to ruin. Then, the ironborn sailed into the harbour from out of nowhere, tooting some great horn. Two dragons followed its sound, the white one and the green one, flying in submission after the Iron Fleet, as if they were a couple of scaled kittens with horns and giant wings, and not wild beasts.

_I wish I had seen more of the dragons, _Tyrion thought. Be as it may, all three were gone now, and there was no way to tell when and if they would be coming back.

"Be gone, woman," Naharis spoke plainly, much to Tyrion's liking. The courtesies of the little scribe, Missandei, did not seem to do the trick, and they had to do _something _to kick out petitioners.

Naharis was supposed to be a suffering hostage of the Yunkai'i when the battle started. His body could have been flung at the city walls from the trebuchet, as it had almost happened to one of the Queen's Dothraki bloodriders, Jhogo, who was saved at the last moment by green dragonflame.

Yet when the fighting was done, the Unsullied found brave captain Naharis in bed with one of Yunkai'i slavelords, or rather, slave ladies, called the Girl General. It was slightly better than if he had shared a bed with the noble Yezzan, Tyrion's former owner, who had died of the bloody flux, and who was so fat that he resembled a yellow whale. The Girl General was sweet, and she was a girl as her name said. Men whispered she had bigger teats than Daenerys. Daario's blue hair had been combed in a Ghiscari fashion, as a pair of protruding wings, one wing on each side of his handsome head.

Daenerys had not been pleased when she was told what came to pass, nor when she had seen her captain. Her black dragon _hissed_. Tyrion remembered shaking in the plaza when they had brought him before her. It looked as if the black dragon was going to burn them all in endless rage. Then the girl-child, Missandei, pleaded for the queen's lover. She said the sellsword captain did what he did to survive and come back to his queen unharmed. And Daenerys heard it all, even what the girl child did not say. As a result, Naharis had to make a solemn promise he would wed Missandei when she flowered and came of age, and not touch any woman until then.

Naharis was left in Meereen, and charged with guarding Missandei with his life while she spoke for the queen. Daario had sworn to do what he was bid, and Daenerys had smiled.

And then, unbeknownst to Daario, she summoned three Unsullied who were more cruel then the rest, led by the eunuch who went by a name of Blue Toad. The queen charged them to watch her treacherous captain, and murder him when he slept, as soon as he would break any of his latest solemn vows.

Unbeknownst to Tyrion, Daario was ordered to murder _him, _if the Lannister Imp showed any signs of betrayal. But Tyrion found out anyway. Being born and raised a Lannister, he had to be good in uncovering plots. Shavepate and Reznak were likely ordered to watch and murder each other if need be. Tyrion wondered what other precautions the queen had taken to preserve the peace in her city, and concluded that perhaps he was better off not knowing. And it might be amusing to discover the arrangements bit by bit when he would be very bored without his loving family.

Ten thousand Dothraki screamers rode in circles around the city, instead of plundering other cities. Another ten thousand rode all over Essos and foraged for food for the great freed population of Meereen. The khalasar belonged to Khal Jhaqo before Daenerys and her black dragon drowned him in the Dothraki Sea. No one knew what Daenerys had done to Khal Jhaqo and his blood riders, and the Dothraki would not tell. Not even to Ser Jorah Mormont who spoke their language. They would only say that Daenerys was a star descended to ride on earth until the day she would return to ride in the night skies, burning bright. No one else in the history of Essos, dragonlord or not, and especially not a woman, succeeded in bending Dothraki to their will in such an unorthodox way. They partially abandoned their nomadic habits for Daenerys. And many good men wasted a lot of ink to describe how that was not possible in the histories they wrote. Daenerys gave her khalasar a mighty gift: the great bronze harpy which used to be on top of the Great Pyramid of Meereen. The Dothraki took it as a trophy to Vaes Dothrak, the sacred city of all the gods they had defeated, but the gift only partially explained the drastic change in their behaviour.

Tyrion learned to admire the dispositions of the new Targaryen Queen. For the first time in his young life of a dwarf he understood how his father could have been Hand to Aerys II for so many long years. When they were not mad, the Targaryens were a force to be reckoned with in the game of thrones. This feature must have appealed to Lord Tywin once, as it now appealed to his son.

"Noble lords," Quaithe would not relent. "Reconsider. We will not leave Meereen as long as you do not name an envoy to go with us."

Tyrion was of a mind to order the Brazen Beasts, the queen's house guard commanded by Shavepate, to show the petitioners the door. Or rather to the stairs to descend from the pyramid. The guards were standing between the high pillars wearing animal masks of brass, most of them locusts. It was a joke Tyrion did not understand. It wounded him that no one ever bothered to explain to him the meaning of the horrid metal grasshoppers. Even Ser Barristan smiled at the locusts before he left. Tyrion only thought that a lion's mask, or a griffin's, even a wolf's disguise, would have been much better to guard a dragon.

His idle thoughts wandered away once more.

The Great Pyramid of Meereen stood higher than the Wall. Eight hundred feet of many coloured bricks were nothing like the seven hundred feet of ice Tyrion had seen a lifetime ago, in Westeros, when he still loved his brother and when he only moderately hated his father and his sister.

There were no white ravens sent from the Citadel to Meereen to announce the change of the season. There seemed to be no ravens in Slaver's Bay at all. Only carrion crows came to the bodies after the battle and even most of those died of the bloody flux just like the people whose corpses they had consumed. Ravens or not, Tyrion could tell it was autumn. Since the battle for Meereen had started, it hadn't stopped raining. The raindrops were dirty yellow, just like the river Skahazadhan in which they landed. The sea was an enormous smudge of dirty grey foam behind the mouth of the river.

The absence of ravens meant that none of the councillors knew how the queen fared in Westeros. Many men and women who loved her, and called her mother, would go out of the city at night, to stare at the dark sky. They listened for the sound of the dragon wings, returning... In battle, Daenerys and Drogon had returned last, under the cover of darkness. And they were gone for a moment, when the ironborn abducted two dragons.

But that was then.

The sky above Meereen was full of rain clouds, and conspicuously empty of dragons.

Tyrion's mind returned briefly to the audience. It was tedious. He almost wished that the councillors would start poisoning each other. It would make matters more interesting. The ousted nobility of Meereen conspired against Daenerys, but their power was temporarily broken, after the slavers had lost the battle, and the Dothraki and the Unsullied took to guarding the city and provisioning it with food. But Tyrion was born for danger in court, and he almost needed it to be able to breathe. It was pathetic, but it was true.

He nearly fell asleep on his Foot's chair when the Shavepate succeeded in being rude enough to end the audience and usher the Asshai'i out of the pyramid. They left a smell of fire in their wake, although only a few torches had been burning in sconces on the walls.

Tyrion changed in a plain garb of a little boy cupbearer Missandei had graciously provided for him. Happy to wear something resembling breeches, he attacked a thousand stairs descending from the pyramid with zeal. When he was down, his stunted legs and back hurt terribly. It didn't matter. Going up was easier, and even more so if you were drunk on the yellow piss the Ghiscari called wine.

Zahrina's hovel was a decent winesink near one of the smaller pyramids. A lotus was depicted on the door, and there were no petitioners. There were no whores either, only naked pit fighters. The gruff bear, Ser Jorah Mormont, worked as a glorious bodyguard in the place. His life lost sense all over again when the queen would not see him at all, repentant of the treasons against her or not. _As if life had any meaning at all..._

Ser Jorah was still mad at Tyrion because Daenerys had demanded to see the Imp. Tyrion almost wetted his badly fitting sellsword breaches when the Unsullied threw him at the feet of their queen.

But Daenerys only asked as a young girl: "Is this the one?

The Blue Toad nodded, and the queen walked to Tyrion, pulled him up on his short legs and knelt beside him. Gently, she kissed his brow.

"Thank you, Tyrion," she said. He never knew if she didn't learn his house name or if she ignored it on purpose. "You have unwillingly done me a great favour. I shall not forget it."

At the end of the battle, the Second Sons ended up fighting within the walls of the city, next to the Great Pyramid. The scions of the great houses of Meereen marched at the pyramid in the confusion of the battle. "To reinstate the rightful king, Daenerys's consort," they said. A ragged man in his night gown emerged out of some sort of postern door, meant for slaves, no doubt. The slavers turned cheerful. Someone uttered: "Death to Daenerys!" As a former slave, even if for a very short time, Tyrion did not like their joy one bit, so he decided to test the sharpness of the Second Sons company's steel on the man's lean body...

"Thank you, Tyrion," Daenerys had repeated, smiling, "for making me a widow for a second time. I am forever in your debt."

That was how Tyrion learned that the man he stabbed was indeed the consort of the dragon queen. He regretted not having had a crossbow. He would have been deadlier and a more elegant kingslayer with the crossbow. _Yes, father, most definitely. _But in the absence of a quarrel, a knife did fine for noble Hizdahr zo Loraq, Daanerys's second husband.

_I'm a kinslayer, a widowmaker, and a kingslayer, now in truth, _he thought with satisfaction. _I did my best to deserve all the honourable titles._

"Ser Barristan told me you were clever," the queen had finally said, her demeanour cool and distant. "Serve me and I will judge you when I return."

Zahrina put a jar of vinegar smelling like piss in front of Tyrion. Two naked women descended to the pit. Ser Jorah stared at one of them, the golden blond, obviously.

"You have to forget her," Tyrion counselled him, but the hairy knight chose to ignore him. Black hairs grew over his entire body, except on his head, balding.

"You probably never loved anyone, dwarf," Ser Jorah spat, "or you would know some things are impossible to forget."

_Tysha. _Tyrion knew. But he wasn't going to tell Ser Jorah.

After two jars of poor wine, and two dead women in the pit, Tyrion was sick of everything, of drink, of mortal arts and of Ser Jorah's sullen attitude. He desired to play the game of thrones _in Westeros_, not in some faraway godforsaken city. He hoped that his depression might be tamed if he ingested some food.

The only snack available in Zahrina's establishment were sticks of unborn puppies. _Crunchy. _Tyrion bit in one of them when the hovel door opened, and an Asshai'i stormed in. One of the two women. _Quaithe._ Without asking questions, she sat in front of Tyrion.

"To go west, you must go east," she claimed.

"Want a bite?" he did his best to ignore her words as much as Ser Jorah had ignored Tyrion. It gave him a false sense of power.

"Asshai is not far from here," she observed.

"Pray, what can I find in Asshai that I cannot find anywhere else in the world?" Tyrion agreed to a conversation, hoping to end it soon.

He offered her a perfectly crispy unborn puppy stick from his plate he hadn't chewed on, yet. Quaithe cringed. He could partially understand. Meereenese dog delicacies were not made for every stomach. He found he rather liked them when he didn't think too much about where the meat came from. It was better than the bowl of brown in some taverns in King's Landing which was sometimes called the Singer's Stew...with pieces of a real singer Tyrion had provided for the serving. The singer would have betrayed Shae. And Tyrion wanted to protect her then, at all cost, not knowing she would betray him just the same, and that he would kill her for it on a whim. She was only a whore and he should have known better. She didn't deserve to die for what she was and neither did the singer. Guilt gnawed at Tyrion as a dog at the bone. He had wanted to be better than his father, but in the end he could not.

Quaithe distanced herself from Tyrion's supper as much as the table allowed, but she didn't leave his company.

"What?" he inquired losing his courtesies. "You like my face better than food? Most women would choose any food over me."

"We are leaving on the morrow. Meat us at first light on the plaza of the pyramid," she whispered. "We will provide a mount for you."

_These Asshai'i don't know how take no for an answer, _Tyrion thought. "You haven't answered my question. What can I possibly find in Asshai that I cannot find here, in the wondrous city of Meereen?"

"A light, a shadow of a dragon. A way to victory," Quaithe said.

"All that means little and less to me," Tyrion said, tearing the dog's meat with his teeth. "It's nothing personal, sweetling, but maybe you should waste your last night in this city in another place, to find some fool who will follow you. I won't."

Quaithe sighed deeply like the crone she was.

"There's one other thing you might find out if you come with us to Asshai," she said.

"A potion ensuring eternal life, no doubt," Tyrion said cynically. "A rare, forgotten book about dragons."

"No," the masked woman shook her head twice.

"Dragon eggs about to hatch," Tyrion offered.

"That too," she admitted. "But that was not what I had in mind for you."

"An elixir to become a giant? Or to grow a new nose?"

The old woman giggled like a young girl. _At least my sense of humour would be appreciated in Asshai, it seems, _Tyrion thought. _Maybe I should go. There's nothing that holds me here, or anywhere else._

_Dragons. If they come back, and I am not here to serve them, I might end up as a piece of charred meat to pay for my treason._

Ser Jorah called him from the back door. "Come, dwarf, leave the lady if she's bothering you. There will be another fight soon."

Two lads, no more than thirteen years old, were stripping themselves naked to descend to the pit. Only one would come out. Tyrion felt bile accumulating in his throat. Perhaps he should walk back to the pyramid, get soaked by rain, and sleep for a week. He dropped a half eaten unborn puppy stick on his plate and asked with utmost disdain. "What did you think I'd find in Asshai then?"

Lacquered mask bathed in the glow of the torches, turning into a skull of coloured wood. Most of buildings in Meereen had no windows, as if their owners had been afraid of daylight. No answer came.

"What will I find out in Asshai?" Tyrion insisted, bored, tired and hurting on the inside, as he was every day since Jaime had told him the truth.

"Where the whores go."

xx

Thank you to the guest who reviewed the previous chapter. Please let me know what you think of this one.


	4. Chapter 4

A huge thanks to TopShelfCrazy for a rather extensive beta work on this chapter :')) It reads so much better now.

This chapter sums up a little bit what happened to the characters in Mummers' Show from Sansa's perspective. It seemed fair to do it now because in this chapter we slowly continue their story. It could also help to any of you who are reading this if you don't want to read the prequel. The characters from the first three chapters never appeared in Mummers' Show.

Thanks a lot to the guest who reviewed. It would make me happy if more of you would review ;-00

**Sansa**

In Sansa's dreams the trees were talking of late.

It was like that time when Father was still alive. Lord Eddard had taken his daughters, Arya and Sansa, to pray in the godswood of the Red Keep. Sansa had dreamed of her brother Bran then. He wasn't crippled in her dream. He was walking with the old gods in the black halls under the white, weightless vastness of snow. She couldn't bring herself to talk of that dream to either father or Arya. It would have saddened father and made Arya angry.

And now the trees were talking with Bran's voice.

They also spoke in another voice Sansa did not know, although it resembled the voice of King Rhaegar. It sounded like a man already dead or on the verge of dying, She shivered, afraid of the premonitions her confused dreams might contain. _The king will not die, he will not die, he can't die... he almost died once on the Trident._ The gods had protected him then, surely they would do it now.

_Would they?_

A white weirwood tree laughed at her in her dream and its cruel mouth swelled with blood.

Sansa stirred and willed her eyes open. As every morning, she was not alone. Sandor was stretched next to her, bodies touching, sunken together on a bedroll under the thick softness of several black and grey wolf pelts.

"I'm truly sorry," Aunt Lyanna had said when she gifted the furs to Sandor and Sansa when they were all about to depart from King's Landing. "Lord Connington is my good friend, but he is also a man of dubious tastes. It has everything to do with how Ned led the forces which defeated him in battle in the Stony Sept. Be as it may, it's what we have, and it is winter. We should not let the past rule us, although we cannot forget it."

Aunt Lyanna had lived in Essos with Lord Jon Connington of Griffin's Roost, while pretending to be a septa; Septa Lemore. She educated Prince Aegon, Sixth of His Name as if he were her own son. Lord Connington as well as Lord Varys who saved Aegon as a baby in the sack of King's Landing believed him to be Rhaegar's son and heir. Rhaegar loved Aegon. He presented him and he regarded him as his son, now and then. Even the Mad King died convinced that Aegon was his grandson, a child of Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia. But his real parents were Lady Ashara and Ser Arthur Dayne, who had both protected Rhaegar's second wife, Aunt Lyanna, by their deaths.

"My lord husband," Sansa whispered softly under the furs, wishing to forget the sad stories from the past if only for a day. She was older now, a woman grown. She knew that where there was joy, there was always a sorrow to match it. She enjoyed addressing him that way, although he mostly snarled at her for it. This morning, he did not seem to mind.

Sandor Clegane was already awake. His grey eyes were clear and calm, absorbing the scarce light from the wagon. It made them shine with life.

They were not dressed.

The intimacy was too much and too little at the same time. She wished they had a home, a place where she could bear him strong sons and beautiful daughters. What they had was a place to sleep without the company of others, and a ride north to uncertain destiny.

They were never completely alone.

The murmurs of an army waking up were sneaking into the wagon through the walls made of thick cloth. And Sansa could very well be the king's niece for all the good that would do to her if his kingdom was not going to survive winter.

They could all die.

Yet in all honour they had no choice but to travel north. Old Nan's stories had come to life beyond the Wall, with all the monsters her tales contained. White walkers herded forward the hosts of the men and beasts they had slain: dead men, dead horses, giant ice spiders and only the gods knew what else. And Sansa's cousin Jon, who was never her half brother but Rhaegar and Lyanna's only child, he was somewhere there among the monsters. He was fighting a lost war if help would not come on time. Mance Rayder had been adamant on that. Jon could die not knowing that both of his real parents had lived where everyone believed they had died in Robert's Rebellion. It was all so very sad, Sansa thought.

Only Sansa's parents had died. The ashes of her lady mother and of her brother Robb's head were sharing the wagon with them, in hope to reach Winterfell. An evil maester had sewn Robb's head to the body of Ser Gregor Clegane, to make him a champion of Queen Cersei at her trial by combat. This way, at least a part of Robb might one day rest in peace: he had been the last Lord of Winterfell and the King in the North, his place was in the crypts. Sansa doubted that the rest of his body, desecrated by the Freys, would ever find its way back home. The deaths of her family were always going to haunt Sansa, despite the wisdom of Aunt Lyanna's counsel about the past. She would always feel guilty for talking to Queen Cersei about her father's plans when she was only a stupid girl.

"My beloved wife," Sandor muttered back with only a slight trace of mocking in his deep voice. "Today we should arrive to the fords of the Trident. If I know Rhaegar, His Grace will turn to melancholy when he faces the ruby ford."

"You know him better than most," Sansa said thoughtfully.

"That's what a life in a male septry will do to you. You get to know the gnats who share your misery. Guess what, I could not even call my horse by his name. There was no wine, no fighting, no women... "

"Stop it, Sandor Clegane," she admonished him, earning a bone breaking hug and a few clumsy kisses on top of the red tangles on her head. She would soon need help to brush it properly.

Of course he didn't mean most of what he said. He was just being awful on purpose. It made her smile. He loved her. The realization always made her smile. Sometimes she was afraid she had only dreamed their love as she had once dreamed about his kiss.

King Rhaegar had survived the battle at the Trident, but he had lost his memory. He believed himself to be the Elder Brother of the Quiet Isle, a famous healer. He had found Sandor Clegane dying on the Trident and he had saved his life. And he had regarded him as a brother ever since.

"His Grace would have done a good deed if he had left me to die instead of trying to fashion a monk out of me," her husband continued being mean.

"Why do you insist on calling my uncle His Grace?" Sansa asked. It was a question which had bothered her for a long time, but a sensitive one, so she hadn't dared to ask it until now. But this morning her husband was talkative so he might be willing to answer her. "He always calls you brother."

"Dogs are not brothers to kings. Dogs are loyal and they serve. That is the way of it. And I got a juicy bone for my service so you won't hear me complaining."

She supposed she was the bone. Sansa sighed. Some things would not change. It pained her.

"I dreamed about my brother Bran again," Sansa said finally, searching for support in her husband's eyes.

"Maybe you should take it up with your aunt or the falcon brat from the Vale before he heads east to his lands. They dream of being animals when they wish. I'm not a warg, only your d-."

"You forget my sister," she reproached him before he could call himself a dog again. Sansa was born a wolf and a fish, but it had never occurred to her to think of herself as either of the sigils. _That's because you've never been strong. You are a pretty talking bird and someone will put you in a cage again, sooner or later._ She was not going to speak of herself as a little bird either, but Sandor could call her so whenever it pleased him.

"How could I?" he said with scorn. "The little wolf bitch is rarely forgetting me."

Arya made quips about Sandor and Sansa being together more often than not. The last friendly thing she told him two days ago was that she had never dreamed that Sansa would marry a large monkey. Sandor had left the wagon not wearing a tunic despite the chill, in a hurry to find a privy at some tree. "A monkey who makes water like a proper dog," Arya added and Sansa was sorely tempted to throw a steel vambrace at her sister. It wasn't fair. Arya's friend, Gendry, had grown a beard which was thicker and thus looked blacker than any hair Sansa's husband possessed. If there was anyone who looked like a monkey these days, it was Gendry. She didn't tell that to Arya though, because she was intent on never being mean to her sister again. Even if Arya did her best to pretend she didn't care for Gendry.

Arya returned to Westeros from Braavos as an assassin sent to kill Princess Daenerys. And when she refused to carry out her orders, the cruel god she had served in Braavos condemned her to sleep until she died. But unlike Sansa, Arya had always been the strong one. She rose from her sleep when Sansa needed help and tricked the god of death.

Sansa was determined to love Arya now that she had a second chance. Maybe she could make a lady out of her, in time. It would please their late mother. Even Aunt Lyanna, who was a warg and who could fight with weapons, could be a great lady, a true queen, when she wanted. So there was no reason that Arya couldn't be one as well.

"These dreams of mine are different," Sansa said gravely to her husband. "It's not at all like when I can sometimes sense the thoughts of the animals-"

"-or mine," it pleased him to mock her further, it seemed.

"Or yours," she hastily agreed, eager to press her own concerns further. "I think that Bran is alive. I think he's calling to me. He's trying to tell me something. But that's not possible, isn't it?"

"Well, if it was a lie that Theon Greyjoy burned Winterfell, and our friend Mance is certain of that, it could also be a lie that Theon killed your little brothers. What was the younger one called? Rickard?"

"No, Rickon. Rickard was my grandfather."

The Hound laughed indecently. "Wasn't that the one the Mad King cooked in his armour-"

"Please don't talk like that," she said, sickened.

"Why not?" he complained boyishly, "it's the truth. And you love me for being awful."

Some things did change.

It was the first time he spoke of her love as if he believed he had it. Sansa smiled against her will.

"I love you anyway," she reminded him, lest he forget.

He had the grace to look ugly and abashed at the same time. Seven foot of muscle and ill-concealed rage in her bed. One of the biggest men alive, who could be timid as a little boy. It made her love him even more.

"Come," she said, trying to rise. She only made it halfway. "It's time to don your armour, my love, although I pray for yet another day without seeing an enemy."

"His Grace forced upon me a squire to do that," he frowned.

All Sansa's husbands had the same squire: Podrick Payne. Ofttimes he looked as if he were afraid that the Hound would cut his entrails out and stew them for supper, as Sandor had so eloquently threatened him on one occasion, when Pod could not find his scabbard fast enough. Craven or not, Pod did his chores admirably. Sansa was happy he would be on her husband's side in battle whenever it came to that. Tyrion was a dwarf and yet he had survived on the bridge of ships falling apart during the battle of Blackwater with Pod at his side. Sandor was as fierce as the Warrior, but a precaution could not harm him, Sansa found.

She prayed to all the gods that no battle would come to them soon. Sansa was no fighter. She would never be like her aunt and her sister. A woman's lot was waiting. Selfishly, she wanted to postpone it.

"I like to help you dress," she said. Her cheeks heated slightly when she allowed herself to study her husband. Half-seated, she could see much more than his eyes. Her thoughts turned unladylike. _On the contrary_, she corrected herself, _they're the thoughts of a lady wife._ He looked as if dressing was the last thing on his mind.

"No," he denied her. "You come back. They won't miss us for another hour."

The dead wolf hairs came to life under Sansa's fingers, the pelts suddenly as supple and warm to touch as her own skin.

"Only an hour?" she wondered aloud. She would still be very embarrassed if Mance Rayder tried to make her accompany him in singing a Bear and a Maiden Fair, as he did when they made camp on the first night after their departure. But after a few weeks on the kingsroad she found she could now tease her husband in bed...

A little bit.

King Rhaegar's army rode north from King's Landing through the empty land.

There were not as many men as one might have wished for. The king did not stay in the city long enough to call the banners after he had made his claim. Only those lords and ladies who had come to the capital to witness the mummers' show knew that the Seven Kingdoms had a new king. And for every lord who came there were at least two who did not. The War of the Five Kings was followed by winter and travelling was a great risk.

Twenty thousand men were riding north. It was only half the number that Rhaegar had taken to the Trident. And even with forty thousand he had lost to Robert Baratheon, Sansa knew.

At least five thousand of Rhaegar's new men were members of the Golden Company. Prince Aegon had brought them back home to Westeros from across the narrow sea. They carried skulls of their previous commanders dipped in gold, and they frightened Sansa. The king was reticent toward them too, although some of the company members had forsaken the black dragon of the extinct bastard branch of Blackfyres, and started flying the red one of the trueborn Targaryens. "A dragon is a dragon," some Westerosi soldiers said. The others nodded and predicted trouble. The rest of the company had stayed in King's Landing to help Lord Connington and Lord Varys rule the city while the king was gone.

Three thousand Unsullied marched north as well, more disciplined and calm than any other men at arms Sansa had ever seen. They came west with Princess Daenerys, and there were more of them on her ships, sailing slowly up north.

The remaining men were a mixture of unknown knights and petty lords, freeriders, commoners of King's Landing and sons of the smallfolk. Most of them had nothing better to do and no food to eat this winter if they didn't march in some direction. Many were unblooded soldiers. They had at least that in common with the unfortunate host Rhaegar had taken to the Trident.

"It's more than enough men to man the Wall," Mance Rayder had judged in the presence of the king. "Your son Jon defended it with less than a hundred men against me and I had thousands on the other side."

Sansa fervently hoped that twenty thousand men would be able to defend the realm from the Others. The white walkers fed on human blood. They would come and snatch their victims when it was very cold, springing from the mists; invisible at first and invincible in the end. Some of them had already come south from the Wall. No one knew how they did it while the Wall still stood.

Sansa knew that the king and her husband had encountered them one night, when they were all travelling south from the Quiet Isle to King's Landing as a company of mummers. Since that time, as if with magic, a frontier had appeared. It broke the riverlands in two, passing through a place called the High Heart. No wall stood on it. It was a natural divide between the north where the monsters could roam freely and the protected south. When Rhaegar's army had crossed it, days ago, they no longer saw people on the road, nor in the villages they passed by.

The rearguard of the king's army was made up of the dead. King Rhaegar was no monster, but he still led north a host of at least five thousand slain, under the command of Lord Euron Greyjoy, their maker. Lord Euron was a different kind of wight. He and a few others could talk. The rest hissed or were entirely mute. All blindly obeyed his lordship, even those missing a head. Deep mistrust ran between the king and the dead lord. His kraken lordship had lost his natural life trying to master a sorcerous horn of the dragonlords, which he had found on his many travels over the seas. With it, he had ensnared two dragons, until Sansa's husband found a way to stop him and set the dragons free. The dead carried his longship, Silence, black sails and red hull hovering over the kingsroad.

In the part of the riverlands touched by winter Sansa became glad for the escort of the dead. The woods and the shrubbery rang with terrifying noises at night. Sansa didn't want to know what awaited there, and thankfully the dead never let anyone through. Or maybe the fires Mance Rayder lit around the camp every evening kept the terrors of the night at bay.

The baggage train had more food than servants. It could feed at least half of the living people marching north until they would reach the Wall. There was hope more supplies would be found on the way, in the Vale of Arryn, in the Neck and in the barrowlands. In those places there had been no fighting in recent years of turmoil, so the crops may have been stored. Everyone ate winter rations, but no one complained. For many of those who set forth with the king had previously spent their days in the decaying parts of the capital not eating anything at all.

The crownlands had been deserted. There were fields where crops were rotting because there was no one to reap them. King Rhaegar had men collect what they were able to salvage. Most of the smallfolk who still lingered near the kingsroad started trailing behind the army, taking all their possessions with them. The number of the mouths to feed grew faster than the supply of food. All this had stopped when they crossed the divide. There are no people here, Sansa had thought, they all left or they all died.

The kingsroad was spattered with a hard crust of mud, blown over the stones by the autumn rains and later frozen by the cold. The first winter snows had melted, but the chill pierced skin and bone, icing the breath coming from the mouth of the living. It was only a matter of time before it would snow again. Aunt Lyanna ordered runners and bear-paws to be made for when they would be needing them, overseeing the labours in person every day. King Rhaegar would sometimes ride with his queen, or walk next to her on horse, or march with his army. When he walked, he'd do it barefoot, a habit he gained when he lived a life of service and penitence. He seemed to feel no cold under his feet.

And then, there were the dragons.

Drogon was the black one. Sansa admired the name, wondering where it came from. Princess Daenerys named Rhaegal and Viserion for her brothers, but Drogon was not a Targaryen name. Daenerys was flying back and forth between the army on the march and the fleet of her ships which sailed north in the direction of Eastwatch by the Sea. Aegon and his confidant, Jeyne, were to ride for Shadow Tower with the Golden Company as soon as they reached Winterfell. Mance Rayder would be their guide. He knew those lands well enough to find a way through them in winter, or so it was hoped. King Rhaegar and Queen Lyanna would travel from Winterfell straight to Castle Black where they would conclude a settlement in which Lord Stannis would bend the knee and they would all join forces to defend the realm if the Long Night truly came. That was the plan.

"Plans seldom work in war", Sandor had warned her, when they started dressing after almost two more hours in the wagon.

"Rhaegar's desire to do right by everyone will be his death." Sansa's husband was as ruthless in his judgement as he could be in battle. "His head is full of things that can't be done. He will hesitate and Stannis will use that to kill him. Then he will reclaim the Iron Throne. Since he learned of Cersei's treachery, Stannis has lived for his claim. He will never let go of it. What else would he do? Cook?"

"Stannis will not kill Rhaegar," Sansa argued with conviction.

"And why not? Who will stop him?" the Hound asked as if he was not expecting an answer.

"You will," Sansa said with belief as tall as the mountains. "Rhaegar thinks of you as brother, but you keep acting as his sworn shield."

Sandor snorted and lowered his eyes. "I'll do what I can," he said.

When they emerged out of the wagon to continue their journey, the king was visibly worried. Another day had passed with no sight of dragons. The white and golden dragon, Viserion, had flown away from the capital with his rider, Ser Jaime Lannister and Ser Jaime's wife, Lady Brienne of Tarth. And the king had sent the green and bronze dragon, Rhaegal, to search for Jon on the Wall. Rhaegal never returned and there was no word, no raven, from his son.

"The lord lizard-lion of the Neck will know what's going on," Mance had told the king. "He knows a great many things. He would be called a wizard, in my north."

Sandor was right as usual. When the camp was gone, it took them only a few hours of riding, or driving a wagon, in Sansa's case, to arrive to the Trident. The view of the river didn't improve the king's sullen mood.

They were fortunate that the fords were still crossable. So far, the gods were with them, it seemed, or at least some of them. The river was a mass of dense water, green like a maester's potion, speeding through its wide bed. The stream ran wild, but it was still shallow enough that the horses could walk through it and the wagons trot over. They would only get a little wet.

Young Robert Arryn would leave east at the crossing, charged to return to his lands and be their lord, although he had been ill most of his life and not yet of age. The king had hoped Ser Jaime would accompany him until the Bloody Gate. The Arryn men had no love for the Lannisters, but it would be safer to go through the mountains and meet the clans with Viserion. And a dragon could go very far in convincing any hesitating lord bannermen about which side they should choose. The Vale of Arryn meant a safe supply of food by the sea. In winter, it meant everything.

"He shouldn't have spared Cersei," Aunt Lyanna ranted when they stopped, as she did almost every day outside her husband's hearing. "Mad or not, she's dangerous and evil, even if Tommen locks her in a dungeon in Casterly Rock." Arya nodded, Nymeria growled, Sansa's husband grunted and Sansa didn't know what to think.

"You are right," Sansa said without thinking further, "Cersei deserves to die, but His Grace wishes to believe she could be different because he is convinced that she is his half-sister." There was no proof that Aerys II ever fathered Cersei and Jaime. Rhaegar had merely used the impression from his youth and the well-spread tale of incest between the siblings to spare Ser Jaime's life. He proclaimed him a Targaryen bastard and thus declared he would not be a kinslayer. Sansa thought that not expecting treason coming from one's own family was a sign of having a healthy head. The road to madness, that Aerys II had followed, lay in the other direction, where kings were afraid of everything and everyone, and most of all of their own kin.

Aunt Lyanna stomped the ground with both feet like a child, Arya scowled and Sandor spat. "Heartless bitch," he said, "that's all Cersei will ever be."

"Rhaegar doubts all his decisions," Lyanna said. "In his heart he's afraid Jaime has already betrayed him by not coming to join us. Where is he? He can find us if he wishes, the dragons sense each other and their riders hear their thoughts."

Sansa didn't know where Ser Jaime was. She wrapped her arm around her aunt. It was easy because Sansa was so much taller than her. Even Arya was taller already, and likely to grow a bit more, although probably not as much as Sansa. Nymeria gave an affectionate lick to the northern queen who patted her head.

"Does... does Jon have a direwolf as well?" Aunt Lyanna asked timidly.

"Yes," Arya explained, "his wolf is white and his name is Ghost."

Lyanna shivered. "It's better than Stranger," Sansa tried to say something to make her aunt feel better.

"The Seven have no power behind the Wall, it is said," Aunt Lyanna whispered. "And a ghost is a spirit of a dead man."

Their aunt never showed fear except when it came to Jon. Sansa and Arya agreed that it was so because she felt guilty. When she had gotten word of Rhaegar's defeat and passing, Lyanna became mad with grief. She faked her own death and left Jon with their father shortly after his birth. She didn't trust herself with her own son. Prince Aegon, Lord Varys and Lord Connington all believed that Septa Lemore came into being to hide Lady Ashara Dayne. No-one ever dreamed that she had been Lyanna Stark.

"Ghost is only a name," Arya said.

"A beautiful name," Sansa had to add.

Aunt Lyanna smiled. "You're both right," she said. "And you both remind me of myself at your age. In different ways."

Sansa felt flattered with the comparison and Arya lowered her head, just like Sandor would do when Sansa would unwittingly embarrass him by complimenting his looks. _Can it be that my sister does not know how pretty she has become while we were apart?_ If it weren't for the fact that she was now one of the royal family, many a young knight or comely soldier would have attempted to woo her. And probably ended up meeting Gendry's hammer. Not that Arya needed any protection. She still had the sword Jon had given her as a parting gift.

The army started crossing the river late in the morning. The party which was to go to the Vale moved aside, preparing to march east with Sweetrobin. Sandor and Arya left to train, perhaps to bleed each other, Sansa feared. The king announced he would cross last with his family, and not first as he had done to face Robert Baratheon.

Rhaegar was restless, pacing up and down the riverfront in his wife's company. When the black wings appeared on the sky, signalling Daenerys's return from the east, he took Aunt Lyanna by the shoulders. "I will send her to the Wall to find Jon and bring him here," he said, staring gloomily in her grey eyes. "No," aunt Lyanna disagreed. "She is your sister and she has your love. But I don't trust her with the life of our son. What if she feeds him to her dragon? It wouldn't be the first time in history one Targaryen did that to another."

"I never knew you took those lessons so much to your heart in Winterfell," Rhaegar said, mildly amused.

"I did not! Arthur had a book about the kings of the Seven Kingdoms. And they were all Targaryens until Robert as you well know. I had to do something when you rode off to your war. I could not ride nor joust with a big belly."

The king kissed her hands. "Sweet wife, it is precious to me that you made yourself digest that bloody history."

"I had to know whom I married."

"I never read a thing about the kings of winter," Rhaegar said gravely. "I should."

"Most likely because there isn't a good account available south of the Neck. There were books about it in Winterfell, but they were probably lost when Winterfell was burned. If you seek such knowledge you will have to dig deep in the vaults of Castle Black, sweet husband..."

The bickering between the spouses was like gooseprickles rising in Sansa's ears.

"I am sending my sister," Rhegar repeated.

"Can't you go?" Lyanna begged.

"A king cannot abandon his army," he said. "I've never done it before and I'll not do it now. Ser Jaime is not here and..."

"-you trust him even less, I know. We agree on that."

Daenerys landed several feet away from the royal couple, black wings flapping, red fire puffing out of Drogon's snout.

"Good sister," Lyanna said coldly, "welcome back." Her expression turned as grim as the faces of the kings of winter in the crypts under Winterfell, long and unforgiving. She tied her beautiful hair, dark brown and shiny silver, into an ugly bun on the top of her head. In Sansa's opinion she had never looked more like a true septa than at that moment.

The princess was a year or two older than Sansa and as pretty as she could be dangerous. Sansa still wasn't sure what to think of her. They had walked together as captive slaves of Euron Greyjoy for a day, helping each other to stay on their feet. But when Drogon returned, the humble, stubborn girl Sansa had met immediately turned into a cold-hearted queen. And that same queen listened to Walder Frey's demand for Sansa's hand without any reaction, except, perhaps, a vague, amused condescension of that atrocity. King Rhaegar had assured Sansa it was all a mummer's farce, but she could never bring herself to believe it.

She shared her aunt's concern. There was no way of telling what Daenerys would do if and when she would meet Jon. Hopefully she would not go as far as to feed him to her dragon. Sansa understood that Jon could also become a dragon rider, but taming a dragon seemed far from simple. Ser Jaime looked as if he was about to fall off and die when Viserion took him up to the sky for the first time, against his rider's will. Sansa had asked Daenerys if it had been any easier for her, hoping that it might be easier for Jon. All she had gotten was an enigmatic smile, stretched thin as a closed jaw of her dragon.

Daenerys and Rhaegar could both ride Drogon as they pleased, in an arrangement unusual for dragonlords. Dragons lived much longer than men so they could have several riders one after another in their lifetime, but a dragon with two riders concurrently was an oddity in Westeros, and there were different and confused stories about Valyria. Sansa's eyes would go wide open when King Rhaegar talked about the greatness of the old freehold, seated next to a camp fire. The flames would make his purple eyes glow red like dragonsbreath, the grass that grew under the heart tree in the godswood of the Red Keep.

The only thing Aunt Lyanna had to say about all that was that she had sailed to the Smoking Sea, where Valyria once was, during her exile. If they both lived through the winter, she would take Rhaegar there, be it on a ship, or on the back of a dragon. When she would speak like that, Rhaegar would sigh and kiss her chastely, then take up his harp and play. Sansa's aunt would listen and mop her tears when the music stopped and she thought no-one was watching.

Sansa was always watching.

There was entirely too much to see on the march. There was never a moment without a brawl here or a trouble there. Sansa wondered if her royal uncle would give her high harp lessons if his retinue ever gave him a moment of peace. She once dreamed of such as a little girl going south to King's Landing. But the only lessons she received back then were in the cruelty of men. In the end she lacked the courage to ask the king about the harp.

And she also wanted to spend as much time as possible with her husband before he left her to march against the snarks and the grumkins.

"Brother," Daenerys smiled, "good sister," her smile was less sweet. "Sansa," the princess behaved like Sansa's friend, but Sansa never knew if she should believe her. "I flew far up north ahead of my fleet, all the way to the place called the Last Hearth. I have seen no sign of Rhaegal or of anyone who calls himself Jon Snow. The people are all holed up in the castle and a small town around it. Some say a green shadow hunts in the woods at night. It used to eat sheep but now there are none, so it eats bears and wolves."

Aunt Lyanna gave the princess a hateful look. Sansa could not understand. _Why would she give wolf pelts to Sandor and her in cold blood but then object to the eating habits of a dragon?_ It was probably that or starve. They might all eat wolf meat or worse by the end of winter. Sansa wondered how roasted dragon would taste and she immediately felt sick. She hoped she'd never have to eat that.

"What of the ships?" the king asked.

"They are approaching Gulltown," Daenerys said and dismounted, sliding down one giant black leg of her beast. Rhaegar smiled at Drogon and patted one of his horns. The dragon exhaled some smoke and belched with satisfaction, vomiting black and white feathers. They could have belonged to an eagle similar to the she-eagle whose skin Queen Lyanna could wear, like Arya wore the skin of her wolf. Sansa's aunt paled.

"It's not yours," Daenerys hurried to reassure the queen. "It's just a bird Drogon caught in the Mountains of the Moon."

"We cannot wait for Ser Jaime any longer," Rhaegar concluded. "Lord Arryn has to continue east, and we north and north-west."

"You could sound the horn," Aunt Lyanna said with hesitation.

"No," Rhaegar said. "If they are too far away I could kill the rider or the dragon by the summoning. I will only do that in dire need, not before."

_Or you could kill Jon if he is learning to ride the dragon_, Sansa thought and kept her thoughts to herself. The king chose his words wisely not to upset his wife.

The king stayed in place and waited. He gazed east, south and west, checking the horizon for white and gold wings swaying in the wind until the sun went down. His sister never left his side. Neither did his wife, the two women glaring at each other. Sansa spent the afternoon with the men and women making bear-paws in place of her aunt. Out of curiosity, she stayed close enough to observe the two ladies and the king.

"A dragon!" Mance Rayder bellowed from the other side of Trident as the sun was setting. The King-beyond-the-Wall was among the first ones to cross the great river, eager to return home. "The white one!" There was indeed a dot of fast moving light on the red sky across the river, growing larger with every moment.

King Rhaegar laughed, for the first time in many days.

"See how my faith was not mislaid," he told his wife. "Will you lend a little bit of yours to my young sister? She is our best choice to find our son fast."

Aunt Lyanna nodded, almost against her will. "Send her out on the morrow," she said as if she hoped her husband would change his mind. "We are all weary today."

"I'll never be weary of flying," Daenerys said with pride, climbing back up the front leg of her dragon. Soon, the black wings soared to meet the white ones, approaching the ruby ford from the distant west.

"I will always listen to you, Lyanna," the king's voice was full of love and her aunt looked embarrassed for enforcing her will.

"I know," she murmured.

Sansa felt superfluous. The bear-paw makers were done for the day and the king and the queen clearly needed to be alone. It meant that Sansa could finally go and find Sandor. There would be some food as well by the fires. She strolled up and down in a simple dark blue cloak with a clean wolf pelt over it. No one paid her any attention. There were many men still busy crossing the river before dark. She walked fast, eager to spot her husband. He trained often since the start of their journey. "To stretch these old bones," he'd say.

The only thing old about him were his many scars. His body was a semi-uncharted land Sansa wished to explore for as long as the gods would allow. Every day she welcomed the moment when it was proper to retire. One more night is all I need, she'd tell herself every evening. I will be brave when he has to leave me. She could say that as much as she wanted. It was no less a lie. She wanted many nights in his arms but only the gods could grant her that wish.

Those same gods who had taken her father, her mother and Robb. The gods who had returned her sister and who may yet return her little brothers.

Everything seemed so exciting when she had travelled south to King's Landing years ago, with Father. She was sure her life was going to be worthy of a song. But the only music Sansa had discovered turned out to be the unstoppable sound of her tears.

Now she was finally going back north and her heart was fuller than it had ever been. She had found love and she had found family. She still had to find home. In Winterfell, or elsewhere.

She wondered whom the gods would take away from her this time and prayed for the strength to withstand it. Maybe they will take me. The notion of her own death was nowhere near as frightening as before.

Sansa was a little girl no longer.

She didn't want to cry.

"You have a squire, but I don't have a maid," she objected when she found her husband. "I need help for brushing my hair."

A knight from the Golden Company laughed. The Hound swung his sword and lopped off a mop of hair hanging above the man's forehead. A tiny stream of blood drizzled down the knight's nose. Sandor grinned with satisfaction. "There's a pretty for you," he said.

The camp fires were like fireflies scattered on both sides of the great river, calling the army to the night's rest.

Sandor gave Sansa his arm and walked with her back to the wagon.


	5. Chapter 5

This chapter would have been a total chaos without my wonderful beta DrHolland. Thank you so much :'))

Thank you to the guest who reviewed. Thank you to everyone who favourited or followed this story. Thank you to the silent majority for reading, pure and simple. I wish more of you would tell me what you think :')) but it's still okay if you don't.

The first two verses of a poem in this chapter are a direct quotation from the Storm of Swords

xx

**Rhaegar**

The Trident would never let him sleep. Not now, and not then.

The murmur of the great river turned into chatter. Chatter streamed into clamour. It became a crushing noise, deafening. Robert's hammer rose and struck his chest. Rubies cut into his soft skin, which had never been made for war. Dragons possessed hard scales, even on their belly. They were not weak like him. His parents would have done better if they had let him forge a maester chain. He tried to breathe, breathe, breathe. He burned. He never was a true dragon.

Rhaegar sat up stiffly, renouncing the useless chase to capture sleep. He seemed to need less and less as he was getting older. _One day I will stop sleeping entirely, _he mused.

Carefully, he freed himself from his wife, from their bedding, from everything. He was glad Lyanna did not wake. She needed more sleep for the little one she was carrying. On an impulse, he picked up his harp. He staggered out of the tent they were sharing, bewildered, shivering. He had never felt less kingly and less a dragonlord.

The camp was asleep. The fires smouldered, dying out. The guards gambled and cursed their luck for drawing the watch for the night. He wondered if he was the only one awake among those who were allowed to sleep. His feet took him to where the dragons were. The real ones, not the fragile ones like himself. How was he to prevail against an enemy who had woken after thousands of years? Was he going to lose the dragons now that the gods had brought them back to life? What was he going to do? Was he to be called Rhaegar the Undecided?

He was calm during day among his family and soldiers, but doubts besieged him at night. Just like Lyanna, he worried about Jon, their son. Unlike her, he frequently contemplated the possibility that their son would hate them both, for any number of reasons. The official truth Robert Baratheon had spread through the Seven Kingdoms, banishing singers who dared making a different rhyme, was that Rhaegar had kidnapped Lyanna and raped her. That was what his older niece, Sansa, believed when Rhaegar had first met her. Did Eddard Stark tell Jon the truth? Rhaegar doubted it. The truth would not keep the boy safe as Ned had promised to do.

There was also the taint of the Targaryens he worried about, but he was loath to mention that to Lyanna. She had suffered enough from it when his father tortured and slaughtered Lord Rickard and Brandon. And he didn't want to add to his wife's overwhelming guilt concerning Jon's destiny. It could prove fatal in her condition. When he was the Elder Brother, a healer, he had seen too many women die in childbed.

Both spouses were painfully aware that something must have gone awry with Jon when Rhaegal did not return, with or without their son. _Gods, he could be d-_ Rhaegar rejected the thought. Jon had to be alive. He comforted himself that the dragons would somehow know if Jon had died. But he still understood too very little about them to be truly confident. Rhaegar shared a connection with the dragons, that much was certain. They would obey him, up to a point. They would come, if he sounded the Valyrian horn. Beyond that, they had a mind of their own. As did Rhaegar or any other man.

He found Drogon and Viserion sprawled on the bank of the river, their long necks intertwined like serpents. It made them look like one giant beast with two heads, two thirds black and red, one third white and gold. Drogon was very much the bigger of the two. When they felt him, they hissed.

"You don't sleep much either, do you?" he asked them, and the sensation of black and gold twisted together invaded his mind. It was not straightforward to talk to a dragon. They would shower him with colours and shapes which sometimes resembled words. "Happy to see each other, are you?" The black and gold scales rattled and twirled in his mind, making Rhaegar so dizzy he had to sit down in the low semi-frozen remnants of grass.

He was not the only guest of the dragons.

There was a shape crouching in darkness several steps away from where he sat. It could very well be his sister. Daenerys spent most of her waking hours with Drogon. She preferred him to the company of men. The head of the other nighttime visitor moved and in the light of very few stars, it was not silver. It was beaten gold and much less straight than his sister's hair.

"Ser Jaime," he said, acknowledging the man as carefully as he could.

Rhaegar knew he should gather the courage to ask his half-brother where he had been, but tonight bravery eluded him. And any such prying would betray his mistrust. It would not be a good way to start renewing his relationship with Jaime after he had told him what he sincerely believed. Aerys II had been Jaime's natural father as much as Rhaegar's.

"Your Grace," the golden head bowed slightly, with just the correct amount of obedience.

It was the first time they spoke after Rhaegar exonerated Jaime of their father's murder. As he had expected, they were not capable of treating each other with anything but cold civility. Rhaegar regretted it, but the armour of courtesy his half-brother had just donned made it difficult for him to remove his own, moulded onto him by his mother and Grandmaester Pycelle from a very early age. The future king of the Seven Kingdoms had to know his courtesies. In the sight of the river which both ruined and saved the Prince of Dragonstone, Rhaegar forced himself to go past them.

"Call me Rhaegar," he said. "Will you not try?"

Green eyes hit him with a look akin to exasperation. _It is worse than I thought. He loathes to be my half-brother._

"Why?" Jaime asked, the question a tiny burst of insolence before the courtly monotony returned to his voice. "I am most grateful for what Your Grace has told the people of King's Landing about me being a royal bastard, but we both know it was only a clever ruse to spare my life. War is coming, not only winter. Your Grace would not want to sacrifice a dragon rider."

Rhaegar put a hand in Drogon's mouth. The dragon allowed it, enjoyed it even. His black teeth were sharp and the king had the impression they were growing day by day. Jaime just had to be stubborn. It was to be expected in a son of a woman who defeated Aerys II by making her own decisions against the Mad King's wishes. As far as Rhaegar heard it whispered, Joanna Lannister had defied the king more than anyone else ever dared. Although, if truth be told, Father hadn't been that mad in times when she still resided at court. _Only cruel. That's how it began..._

_How long can he deny the obvious? _Rhaegar thought about Jaime. His thoughts took flight and were blown out of his human mouth in place of dragonfire.

"Do you deny that your love for your sister was true?" he asked his half-brother. "Despite all the teachings of the old gods and the new about how heinous an abomination that was? Do you deny that you are a dragon rider? Why was your son Joffrey mad and your sister cruel before succumbing to her own madness? Would any of it be true if you were only a Lannister of Casterly Rock?"

Rhaegar couldn't help colouring the name of Lannister with certain contempt. Lord Tywin was one of his father's best friends when they were squires. And then he had ordered the death of Rhaegar's children in cold blood.

Jaime winced. Obviously, Rhaegar's tone had been a mistake. "There existed lowborn dragon riders in the past who were proven not to have a single drop of Targaryen blood. Why should I have it? What good is it for?" Jaime said spitefully.

"How do you know about those riders?" Rhaegar's curiosity jumped above all other considerations. It was a fact little known outside his own family or obscure histories almost no-one read in this day. "What else do you know about dragons?"

The river raged below them. It was fast, rich, beautiful in the darkness.

"Me? Next to nothing," Jaime said carelessly. To his credit, he patted Viserion's horn. Rhaegar smiled at the gesture, unwillingly. "I heard this and that about them from my little brother. I can't remember half of it now. Tyrion read all that there was to read about dragons."

"Did he?" Rhaegar wondered aloud. "He was with Daenerys in Meereen, wasn't he?" A notion crossed the king's mind. A way to preserve at least one of the dragons far away from harm.

"I believe it may be so. Ask her, if it please you, Your Grace," Jaime said, so impeccably polite that it hurt.

"Will you fly with me, Ser Jaime, if you refuse to call me by my name?" Rhaegar asked bluntly, every single bone in his body pleading for sleep. He hadn't had a proper rest in days. Ever since they began approaching the fords, he had been hearing the voices of the river.

His half-brother padded up to Viserion. "As Your Grace commands. Where to?" Jaime only missed a white cloak to be the perfect knight of the Kingsguard. A practice Aegon the Conqueror introduced and which Rhaegar was keen on abolishing if he had a chance.

For a start, he had Sandor Clegane following his steps of his own accord; the burned man said no vows and he was now married to his niece, Sansa. For Rhaegar, Sandor was the younger brother that Viserys never had the chance to be.

Rhaegar never understood why an honest man and a good fighter, who loved his wife, would defend his king any less for having her. He found that battling was a worldly profession, from the lowest soldier to a Sworn Brother of the Kingsguard. And the vows of chastity made sense only for those who experienced the true calling of the faith, freed from desire to marry or procreate by the will of the gods. Forcing people to take such vows for the sake of honour did more harm than good, Rhaegar believed.

He knew that his ideas were dangerous. Aegon V the Unlikely tried to rectify the laws and the customs of the Seven Kingdoms. As a reward, the gods let him burn in Summerhall. Wildfire, apparently, could kill a dragon. _As can dragonfire itself, _Rhaegar almost hissed at the thought, fearing Jaime for a brief moment.

The white dragon uncoiled himself from his black brother and blew a thread of stinky smoke in his rider's face. The air smelled putrid. Green eyes filled with tears. "Damnation!" Rhaegar sighed because Jaime even _cursed_ politely, "I'll never get used to this."

"I am not so pleased when Drogon does it to me either," Rhaegar confessed. _We do have something in common, you and I, _he thought, _you may yet see it one day. _A thinner spike on Drogon's neck where his head began looked like a safe place to hang the harp. He lodged it between two long strings, hoping the instrument wouldn't break before they reached their destination. Inside his mind, he asked Drogon if it bothered him. Black sadness filled Rhaegar and cleared his concerns. The dragon was sorrowful, but the harp was not the cause of it. The beast couldn't or wouldn't tell him the reason.

"We should head for Oldstones, I think, and fast," Rhaegar decided on a whim. "I should like to return here before Lyanna is awake..." _Maybe there is another way to find out where Jaime had been, without being suspicious. _Surreptitiously, Rhaegar inquired. "Is Lady Brienne well?"

"Flying makes her sick," Jaime sweetly. It was obvious he admired his wife. "But she's more stubborn than I am and she never gives up. She insisted on coming with me although the very sight of Viserion makes her stomach churn."

"Was it a long flight?" Rhaegar asked of the night in front of him, innocuously, both hoping for an honest answer and dreading it.

"After you told me about Aerys," Jaime started, "we went to see the Ghost of the High Heart. She told me I knew who I was in my heart. Only I didn't know. I still don't. So I went to Riverrun to find my aunt Genna. But she's disappeared. Dead, most likely. Blackfish's work or some of his allies. Or taken by the wights which are occasionally sighted in the riverlands. No-one knows. Only that weasel of her Frey husband still holds Riverrun's empty walls with a handful of men. And not for long, I'd say."

Rhaegar was ashamed. He had suspected Jaime of treason, of plotting against him, of stealing Viserion for himself. And all that time his half-brother was looking for the unmistakable proof of his identity.

"Up we go," he said, scrambling up the long, wiry paw covered by thick black skin and scales harder than steel. Jaime obeyed. Up, the air was fresher, and Rhaegar could almost touch the stars. It was an illusion, but they sometimes tasted sweeter than the real. _Faster, _he made a wish, painting speed inside his mind. The dragon had seen it or heard it. The flapping of wings drummed in his ears. Rhaegar overtook Jaime and soared on dragon's back, for the first time with no fear that he would wake up as someone else and forget his own name. _I am Rhaegar, Rhaegar Targaryen and I will be remembered. Yes, but as what? _

Rhaegar the Undying sounded perfectly possible at that moment.

Viserion made a loop in the air. For several moments Ser Jaime was hanging from the dragon, head down, legs up. He never fell. He laughed like a little boy. _I have to try that, _Rhaegar thought, _before I get too old. _"You are becoming skilled in this," he yelled at his half-brother from Drogon's back. The black dragon suggested it was Viserion who was clever, not Jaime. Rhaegar grinned.

They were almost at Oldstones and their speed was incredible.

The ruins of the first men rose between the moss, gloomy and powerful. It was dark on the hill. The dragons found a craggy patch of ground empty of collapsing structures to land safely, kneeling, folding their wings. Rhaegar slid down Drogon's right paw. As he did that, he felt again the disconcert of his dragon. Well, _his_ was not the right word. Drogon had become a companion. He acknowledged Rhaegar as a lord, a father, or simply the oldest member of their family, but all his love was for Daenerys, and Daenerys alone.

Viserion crouched so that Jaime could dismount as if he had ridden a horse. The white dragon could carry two people on his back, no more. Jaime and his wife, both tall and strong, were the most he could handle. Drogon, on the other hand, had grown so much that he could carry more than a dozen men on his shoulders and back, Rhaegar estimated. That is, if the beast would allow it and fly with care, instead of deciding to drop his load high above the ground.

The ruined castle smelled of lichen; musty and damp. Next to the heaps of crumbling stones, the blocks used for the foundations were enormous. They led to a belief that the First Men had building skills which were now lost. After all, they had built the Wall from blocks of ice and the foundations of Winterfell from boulders out of the mountains. _Or was it the giants who did all that when they and the children of the forest still walked this earth? Or was it all lies, plain and simple?_

They left the dragons on the slope of the hill, playing among the stones. Rhaegar carried his harp, venturing forward into the castle. Jaime was as close behind him as his own shadow. _He could cut my throat now and no-one would be the wiser. _It was an awful, undeserved thought, but it could not be helped. For as much as Rhaegar understood and did not condemn the murder of their father, he'd always know it was Jaime who did it.

_Sit, play! _The voice of the dead river king was calling him, with the strength of Trident, from his grave of stone. The sensation was peculiar and could not be denied. Rhaegar approached the final resting place of King Tristifer IV Mudd. A carved stone figure slept peacefully on the tomb, its face been eaten by the passing of time. Rhaegar would not offend the dead king by sitting on his likeness. Therefore, he sat among the crumbling stones and played to cheer up. And since he knew no songs about King Tristifer, there was only one person of whom any bard should sing in Oldstones.

_High in the halls of the kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her ghosts,_

_She'd dance to remember when her love had found her,_

_lost among the stones._

_xx_

_Spring it was then, the birds had come back_

_from the southern lands,_

_Duncan first saw her when Jenny was weaving_

_flowers in her hair._

_xx_

_Was she a woods witch, a dream, a vision?_

_Prince Duncan had not known._

_She would sing to the bees and to the birds_

_To make the flowers grow._

_xx_

_The crown prince had begged her then_

_to be his lady love_

_She said no, for she'd only belong_

_to a Prince of Dragonflies._

_xx_

_Gone is the prince, gone is his father_

_gone their best knights_

_Burned and buried, ash and bones_

_in ruins of Summerhall._

_xx_

_Abandoned and forgotten,_

_as alone as she is fair,_

_now lives Jenny of Oldstones_

_with flowers in her hair..._

The tune was sad, sad, sad, and so simple that other verses could be added at will if there were listeners cheering for more. Lyanna would wipe a tear whenever he sang of Jenny. It was one of her favourites. Rhaegar had sung it in Harrenhal, at the feast which took place the day before the final joust; when he had crowned Lyanna the Queen of Love and Beauty.

When Rhaegar stopped playing, he glimpsed a silhouette of a woman farther up the hill, deeper in the ruins behind the grave of King Tristifer. "Do you see her?" he voiced to Jaime. "Lyanna?" he called, believing he had somehow conjured his wife out of nothing.

"All I see is darkness," Jaime said from somewhere very near by, yet Rhaegar could not see him. He was still seeing a woman, a vision, a young maid with long chestnut coloured braid. She was too tall to be his wife.

And she had flowers in her hair.

The king walked toward the woman, occasionally stumbling on uneven ground in the absence of light. The stars were too few, as if they were afraid to rise that evening.

"This is not my song," the woman said in a kind, interested voice; young and very old at the same time. "But it is a song about me. A new one." Rhaegar rubbed his eyes with force, but none of his gestures would make her disappear. "I took two verses from your song and made up the rest myself," he confided.

The first two verses were indeed not his own, they belonged to the famous song about Jenny of Oldstones, as widely known in Westeros as the song of Florian and Jonquil. The rest of the story he invented every time anew.

"How shall I pay you for your song, Rhaegar Targaryen, grand-nephew of mine?" the illusion was losing its fullness on the edges when she moved. "What do you want to know?"

The woman glided above the moss and over the stones, dressed in weak starlight.

"How to survive the Long Night," Rhaegar breathed out.

"There are many stories about that," Lady Jenny

said thoughtfully. "In one of the stories, the last hero set forth with twelve companions. On the way, all his companions died as did his horse and his dog. But the hero was victorious in the end."

"What does that mean?" Rhaegar asked, impatient.

"Whatever you make of it, of course," Jenny said daintily. "Duncan never listened to me either. Sing again if it pleases you. I want to think of my only love, and dancing alone is so terribly lonesome."

So Rhaegar sang until his voice was hoarse and dawn could be seen on the horizon. He wondered where Jaime had gone.

"Thank you," Jenny said. "And now I will tell you something you didn't ask for, as a reward for your patience. You will not see your son Jon, nor your unborn daughter, before you die. And should you choose not to die, you will never see them, not in this life, nor in the next. Think on it, Rhaegar, when your time comes."

"I am hallucinating," he stated. "I haven't slept in days and now I'm seeing things."

"Are you?" Suddenly, the winter and the darkness were gone from the world. Tiny white and red flowers appeared, scattered between the stones. Jenny picked three of them and wove them in her hair. "The dragon has three heads," she said, sounding like Cersei when she went mad.

"Who is the prince that was promised?" _She must know this. It was the witch who came with her to King's Landing that made a prophecy. And forced my mother into an unhappy marriage to my father._ "Is it Jon? Is it Daenerys? I used to believe it could be me. I even thought it could be Aegon who is my son out of love I bear him even if he is not of my body. Tell me!" his commanding voice sounded crazed, like father's. Rhaegar was ashamed, but it didn't make his demand any less urgent. In stories, if you met a vision, it helped you.

As always, nothing in life went exactly as in the stories. Jenny of Oldstones vanished, returning to the ghosts of her own. Moss reeked in the darkness, the only thing that still had a scent in winter. The morning light had not yet come.

" I guess I should better die then, when the time comes," he said out loud. One part of him hated it. He hoped beyond hope he would be allowed to live, five, maybe ten more years with his family. Maybe more. Rhaegar was well past his fortieth name day. But Ser Barristan had seen more than sixty name days and he was still strong. It was not unheard of to live long. Well, it was almost unheard of if you were king.

"Have you said something to me, Your Grace?" Ser Jaime's tone was half-mocking and it came as if from a great distance. Rhaegar turned around and saw him right behind his back. It seemed that only a moment had passed and not the entire night. "I saw someone," Rhaegar stuttered, "someone unreal".

Jaime kept silent.

"I don't blame you, you know," Rhaegar spat out the words as jets of dragonflame, setting the darkness on fire. "I truly don't. The laws of the realm be damned. I wasn't going to have your head for something I would have done myself if I was less of a fool, and if I was as successful in conspiring in Harrenhal as I was in falling in love."

"If, if, if, if... I was one of his Seven," Jaime said gravely. "Nothing can change that."

Drogon screeched loudly as if to cheer the two men up. The beast pushed its head between the ruins next to them. It stretched its right paw far forward and lowered the head alongside it, to make Rhaegar's climb easier. The king imagined the fords of the Trident. It was a very imprecise way to steer a dragon, but for him it worked better than telling him where to go.

They rose high on the wind of the impending dawn. When Rhaegar looked down, the air convulsed below them. Thousands of flowers floated on it, red and gold and white.

"Good-bye, Jenny of Oldstones, with flowers in your hair!" he shrieked, and he would have tossed his helm in the air if he had worn one. Fortunately, Jaime had gone beyond the clouds and could not hear him. Rhaegar must have been turning mad. It was always a distinct possibility. "And should you dwell in seven heavens, tell Aegon the Unlikely and the Prince of Dragonflies that Rhaegar the Unfortunate has no fear of joining them!"

_I have died once, _he tried to comfort himself. Except that he didn't. Fire, river, and the short, old man from the Quiet Isle had saved him. _How hard can it be to die for real? _He supposed he was going to see sooner than he would have wanted.

"Farewell"_, _the flowers whispered behind him, but the king did not listen.

"Farewell, Rhaegar, the Unafraid..."

Windswept, airborne, King Rhaegar flew back to his army and to his family. When he landed, he saw that Ser Jaime had beat him to it, already squatting at the same place where Rhaegar had found him in the middle of the night. His wife, Lady Brienne, had joined him. On both sides of the river, men were waking. Daenerys was up as well, unmistakable in her white lion pelt, even from under the snow clouds which were trailing Drogon's flight. The lion had come from the warmth of the Dothraki Sea but it adjusted more than well to the Westerosi winter. Rhaegar couldn't see his wife or any of his nieces. Drogon landed, a splash of large, spiked tail over a mass of water. It showered the king's long hair and the dragon's bright black scales. Rhaegar had to wring out the excessive wetness.

He felt more and more like a monster from the songs. _Destined to die. As if I hadn't known that since the day I was born. _It was so utterly foolish to believe that he might have been the prince that was promised. At that moment, Lyanna lifted the flap of their pavilion to come out. The king smiled on the inside. _I will love you with every moment I still have. _And then, just like that, his indecision abandoned him for a short while and he knew exactly what had to be done. He knew the orders that should have been given. He knew.

Lyanna joined him in a hurry. She was wearing a long, grey dress hiding her body. She did not show yet, but they both agreed it was better if she dressed in a way not to show anything at all. They didn't want people to know. As a king, you never knew which enemy might put your unborn child to the sword. _Rhaenys. _Rhaegar blinked away the tears. He had ridden to the Trident and he had left Elia, Rhaenys and Aegon in King's Landing. He thought they would go to Dragonstone with his mother. Except that father would never have let them, of course. Rhaegar deserved to burn in seven hells for the stupidity of having expected reason from Aerys II in his twilight.

A touch skirted his lower arm, the short figure of his wife closed on him. A support. A lover, a friend and a fellow fighter. _She will always be stronger than I am, _he thought. "My queen," he told her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. His hair dripped river water on her cloak. She didn't seem to be bothered by it. "My king," Lyanna nested against him, visibly relieved. "Another sleepless night?" Rhaegar nodded.

"Ser Jaime, Lady Brienne" he said, finding his kingly voice. _The easier task first. _"I have thought a great deal. We know little as it is about dragons and there will be no time for scholarly work in war. I am asking two things of you as your king and your kin. Take Viserion. Bring young Lord Arryn safely to the Bloody Gate. When this is done, fly to Gulltown and choose two of my sister's ships. Small and swift ones, to help you with the crossing. The narrow sea is perilous in winter. Viserion still has to grow and the Slaver's Bay is much farther than the Free Cities. Fly to Meereen and bring back your brother Tyrion to advise us about dragons."

"The dwarf never mentioned knowing anything," Daenerys said, mildly puzzled.

"Then for once he kept quiet for his own sake," Jaime said. "He was always the smartest of the three of us, but he never knew when to hold his tongue." Lady Brienne frowned at her husband's bluntness, but Daenerys only smiled. Jaime's insolence seemed to sit well with her ever since she decided to ignore that he had killed their father.

"Tyrion dreamed of riding a dragon when he was a child," Jaime continued more seriously. "He will probably hate me more than he already does when he sees me taking that away from him as well. But I will do as you say, Your Grace. What is more, I rejoice at your command. For the longest time I have wanted the chance to find my brother and ask for his forgiveness."

"You loved him," Lady Brienne objected. "You saved him from death. What is there to forgive?" Jaime made a face. Whatever it was, Rhaegar thought, his half-brother was most unwilling to talk of it in public.

"Let us find something to break our fast, my love," Jaime said to his wife. The trick worked. Lady Brienne would mostly turn taciturn whenever Jaime displayed his affection in public. It would make her appear as gentle as his niece Sansa. Brienne and Jaime had only been married for a few weeks. He tried to remember how long it took to Lyanna not to shy away from him when there were eyes watching them. Weeks? Months? Then again, Lyanna had always been more outspoken than Rhaegar in showing what she wanted. Her outburst against his sister the day before proved it. He wondered what Daenerys had made out of it. She had given Lyanna no cause to hate her. _So far._

His wife chose to surprise him. Again.

"Good sister," she approached Daenerys and took both of her hands. She was half a head shorter than his sister. "I doubted you yesterday. You have to forgive a mother's heart. You are so young that you could be my daughter. When you bear your own children one day, you will understand." Daenerys looked crestfallen. Her eyes darkened imperceptibly and she smoothed her hair to hide her unease. Lyanna could not see that, but Rhaegar had always had the eyes which saw everything. His wife's face softened when she wished Daenerys well. "Fly well and fly fast and bring me my son. If you do, I shall be forever grateful."

His sister didn't know what to say. She was better accustomed to war than to peace. "I am very curious to meet my nephew," she managed. It sounded like a truth, but perhaps not the entire one.

"But if I was wrong to trust you now," Lyanna released the hands she had been holding, "best know that the north is cruel. The Starks did not prevail over the Boltons, who skin their enemies, by being honourable. Honour came later when we learned how to rule, from so many mistakes." Lyanna paused to gather her strength to threaten Daenerys and Rhaegar, who knew his wife, suppressed a smile.

"The Starks became Kings in the North because the wolves proved more ferocious than the rest. They showed no mercy to their enemies. Don't expect any from me if any harm comes to Jon by your doing. My ancestors may have knelt, but I have no fear of you, dragons," Lyanna finished, studying all three of the dragon riders as an eagle circling its prey. "Never had it, never will."

It was the truth. Rhaegar still remembered Harrenhal and how his future wife, then a maid of six and ten, provoked his father, something he had never dared doing himself so openly. Instead he stupidly confided in the plotting of the high lords to help him ascend to the throne.

He would have loved Lyanna at that moment if he hadn't fallen in love with her already.

Daenerys studied his wife. She would have bared her fangs like Drogon if she had them, Rhaegar sensed. Then, she relaxed and appeared at ease with the smaller woman in front of her. "Your concern is noble, but unnecessary," she told Lyanna. "I know what it is to be a mother. Although my children are not human," she added, to make Lyanna understand.

Rhaegar didn't need an explanation. _The Mother of Dragons, _he thought with pride. _I cannot compare to you. I merely survived with my dragon blood. It pleased the gods to determine that my suffering was not done yet. But you, sister, you succeeded where thousands of wise men could not. Your dragon eggs hatched. Who better to teach my son about our part of his inheritance? The Starks have good fifteen years of advantage over us._

He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't notice tears great as pebbles rolling down his wife's cheeks. Yet she stood there dignified as beautifully carved stone, making a conscious effort to trust Daenerys against her motherly fears. It moved him so deeply that he decided to say out loud what he wanted to say to his sister in private. Lyanna was strong enough to take it, pregnant or not. She deserved to know all the odds of being married to _him_.

"There is another reason I am sending my sister to find Jon," he said quietly. His wife and his sister stared at him, waiting.

"Lyanna, you've seen first hand what my father was. Daenerys you have grown with our late brother, Viserys. I understand he was more like our father than I would have wished."

"Oh," Lyanna put her hands on her mouth, nails sinking in her upper lip as the realisation sank in her mind. "I never thought-"

"We are his parents and we will love Jon no matter what," Rhaegar managed to finish, "but we have to know what is in him. I trust that my sister will be able to see this clearly more than either you or I would be able to. She has no attachment to him."

Lyanna chased away her tears and bit a nail. The north was cruel, but it was also strong. "I see," she said, calm as the sky that morning. "But there is a good chance that he'll be all right, isn't it? Sansa, Arya and Mance are very different from one another and yet they have only words of praise for him."

"My father was once only a vain lad in love with songs, feasts and flatterers. Not a great king, but not a monster either," Rhaegar said. "And there is more. According to rumours about our family, some of the babies born to the Targaryens over time were not human. They were dragons. Winged, scaled, blind monsters in the wombs of women. None of them ever lived and the mothers rarely survived them. The historians attribute this to witchcraft in a few instances that a case was widely known. But I tell you, it is no sorcery. It's just another thing that comes from the blood of the dragon, its glory and its misery. In our family, this was never written down. We were told the story by our mothers. The occurrence was rare, but it happened every now and then in the known history. And it didn't matter if both parents were Targaryens or not."

"You never told me," Lyanna's voice was accusing. Maybe it was more than she could take.

"I was scared," he admitted. "But this time I'm determined to do better."

"And if... if..." his sister was very curious all of a sudden, not shocked at all by his revelation as he would have expected. "If a woman bore such a child, a dragon in her womb, and if it died, but if she lived... Was there ever a woman who carried a living human child afterward?"

"Yes," Rhaegar said, "at least one that I know of. Black Betha, she was a Blackwood, the wife of Aegon V the Unlikely. Her first child was a monster. Her second was Prince Duncan. The Prince of Dragonflies."

Daenerys's violet eyes widened with wonder. "Oh," she said, "how interesting. Thank you, brother, for continuing my education. I am afraid that Viserys never spoke of this."

"Viserys was too young when our mother died. I learned it when I was a man grown. The children are not told, not to burden their young minds. And also that they don't repeat the story to anyone outside the family."

Daenerys regained her composure. "I have heard both of you," she told the king and his queen. "This, I tell you. This, I promise you," she vowed, speaking the Common Tongue with the courtesies of some foreign language Rhaegar did not know.

"I shall find my nephew. I shall find out where he is and what he is. And I shall bring him back if death or madness do not take me first." Daenerys sounded convinced, but Rhaegar was not. Only the gods knew how their destiny would unroll. He should pray to the Crone to lift her lamp and show them the way.

While the king was talking and before the conversation was done, his army had finished crossing the great river. It was Aegon who came for the king when his party assembled to go. He had stood politely on the side waiting for Rhaegar to finish.

"It is time," Aegon said finally. Ser Arthur Dayne's sword, Dawn, was sheathed in a white weirwood scabbard, slanted over his back. Rhaegar raised his eyebrow. "A gift from Mance." Aegon answered the king's unspoken question about the scabbard. "He says it fits my shiny steel better than his dented one."

It was Mance's way of saying that he expected Valyrian steel to defend his people, the wildlings from behind the Wall. Rhaegar smiled. The wildling would yet help them win this war.

Drogon spread his wings and squawked at his mother. "Not yet," Rhaegar begged, "I have need of you for one more thing."

Rhaegar crossed the Trident on the back of the dragon. High up, the ruin of his chest did not throb. There was still light in the world and his dreams didn't disturb him. Above the snow clouds, he waited. Soon there was no one left on the bank of the river where the kingsroad wound slowly back south to King's Landing.

With purple eyes wide open Rhaegar dreamed of all-consuming fire at the fords. Black and red flames jutted from the black dragon's mouth as Drogon and his rider descended sharply through the clouds. His white brother joined the effort. Rhaegar had passed through snow, but he never felt the cold, focused on his daydream of fire. Dragonfire hit the crossing, deepening the riverbed, broadening the gulf.

The wildness of the waters did the rest.

No one, friend or foe, was going to cross the Trident until spring. And those who dared going north could not turn back.

Shaken by the power of his fire-dream, Rhaegar landed.

"Time to go," Jaime said from mid-air. Brienne perched behind him, her long hair loosened, cheeks flushed from

the wind. Young Robert Arryn was already leading his company east. Rhaegar had said his farewell to the boy the day before. He wondered if he was ever going to see any of them again. The king nodded to Jaime. "Until next time we meet," he said as firmly as he could, not believing his own words.

Daenerys gently touched Rhaegar's shoulder and led the black dragon away. "No time to lose," she whispered to the beast. "Drogon, take me to Rhaegal."

As the wings of the two dragons leaving obstructed the view of the grey morning sky, Rhaegar approached Lyanna from the back. He circled her waist with both hands, possessively, holding to her for both warmth and strength. The heat was gone from him and he was suddenly freezing. All of his courage seemed to have drifted to the air with his siblings and their dragons.

"Kingship is a tricky business for a Targaryen," Rhaegar said wistfully when only Lyanna could hear him. "We all start wishing to be Aegon the Conqueror. And then we end up being Maegor the Cruel."

xx

If things are not clear and if you wish to read this further, give a chance to the prequel. I'm trying to sum up in this story what has happened before, so that it can be read separately, but I'll never be able to repeat everything.

This story is now set on many different stages on which it will continue. Brace yourselves for a very long tale and many POVs. Next up and about will be Daenerys in about two weeks. Meeting Jon :'))


	6. Chapter 6

Huge thanks to TopShelfCrazy for making this chapter understandable to more people and not only to the foolish author.

Thank you to the person who reviewed last chapter and to everyone who followed or favourited this story.

Thank you for reading.

Warning for some violence and gore, not very graphic.

**Daenerys**

The north was greater than it looked.

Viserys taught her very little about it when they were children; above all that Rhaegar died on the Trident for the woman he loved, and that she had been of the north.

And that one of the brothers of the northern lady had become the Usurper's most faithful dog, doing his bidding and licking his hands. But those were only stories full of either charm or cruelty. They represented no knowledge of the land Daenerys was now determined to cross on the back of her dragon.

When she was married to Khal Drogo, Daenerys came to doubt that Rhaegar had died for love. She had come to love and cherish Drogo with all her heart, yet she still chose not to follow him to the night lands when he lost his life.

The truth of many matters was very different from Viserys' tales. The Usurper's most faithful dog had in reality been the staunchest protector of Rhaegar's son and heir. Eddard Stark raised Jon as his own bastard son, Jon Snow. And both Rhaegar and his northern queen still lived, as if life itself were a song, from time to time.

Whenever she remembered finding her brother, Daenerys would smile.

_I'm not the only one any longer, _she would think, elated.

It was more than she ever hoped for.

Even the dragons seemed happier for it. While Drogon hadn't become tame and docile since he allowed one more rider to steer his flight, he had certainly grown more orderly for a wild beast. He even scorched his food with more precision, Dany observed.

Drogon adapted to Rhaegar's personality. Deep, melancholy mood swings frequently reached Daenerys from the black dragon of late. He became slow to anger, yet he still possessed an undeniable fierceness, a wrath best left alone. In that too Drogon was like her brother. Dany soon realized Rhaegar did not know how strong he was; he saw himself as weak. The realization made her wonder what Rhaegar had discovered about her that she did not know herself, in the rather short time they had spent together.

_I don't have to be the queen of Westeros, _she rejoiced as the dragon spread his leathern wings and greeted the morning sun by a shrill, heart-piercing cry. With the burden of duty to her house set aside, only grim thoughts of Meereen ruling itself in her absence would sometimes spoil the immense joy Daenerys had felt since she had found Rhaegar alive.

Today there were so many novelties to look upon and to consider that it was easy to chase the worries away. One day she would have to fly back to Essos, to make sure that her freedmen and women were not enslaved again. But it was not this day.

The north was like no other land Daenerys had seen.

Gulltown was only the beginning, and it was not even the true north, only an outpost of the Vale of Arryn, a bleary, insignificant town staring mutely at the narrow sea. Dany had joined her ships on the open seas while they were creeping north among high, galloping waves in the proverbially foul weather of the winter season. She commanded two of her swiftest vessels, both of Volantene design, to take anchor and wait for Ser Jaime and Lady Brienne in Gulltown. Ser Barristan was left in charge of the fleet in her absence, with orders to carry on to the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and defend it from all foes in the name of the king.

Dany was satisfied that her maids had finished weaving her a tunic and trousers of thick white wool, to wear under the pelt of the _hrakar_, the great white lion killed by Drogo and gifted to her. She had purchased the wool in King's Landing with golden coins from the Slaver's Bay, showing a face of a long dead Ghiscari king with a big nose. Her Dothraki sandals stayed on the ships as well, waiting for Dany to return, or perhaps for spring, who could tell. She donned simple boots of sheepskin, with thick leather soles, hoping they would serve her well. The further north they went, the more she felt as if she could only warm her feet sufficiently on Drogon's harsh belly.

Finally, she tucked her silver hair inside a furry cap with dark grey hairs billowing from it almost as long as her own. A commoner had made a gift of it to Rhaegar, because her brother had helped deliver his son. The man claimed it was made from the skin of a unicorn from Skagos and that it would keep the head warm and steady in any winter. Rhaegar had thanked the man and passed the queer headdress to Daenerys when the newly made-father was gone. "I have no use for it, sister," he had said. "Although I sense it is precious to him, so I give it to you, for you are precious to me." Rhaegar's hair had grown so unnaturally long and thick since the winter began that his silver mane now looked warmer than any unicorn's.

Up north from Gulltown, beyond a much more beautiful city called the White Harbor on the maps, a thick layer of snow enveloped the world.

As she flew, the windswept moors and high plains that were flat and desolate, became covered by forests that loomed tall and untouched, as if human hand had never harvested a single tree from them to build a house or light a fire. The plains dwindled into craggy, dangerous shores in the east with no safe anchor for ships. Drogon flew left and right, up and down, back and forth, uncertain of the path to take.

When the dragon landed to rest, Daenerys stepped in the snow. She was tiny for a woman, yet her feet sank through the white crust in an instant, becoming unpleasantly cold, boots or no boots. The snow reached up to her knees. Drogon rolled in it, as was his way, to lose tension after a long flight. Fire filled him on the inside and he had never felt a chill.

A tender, loose branch of a pine tree begged to be touched. Dany reached for it, but the wood resisted being picked. She shook some snowflakes off it and was shocked to uncover the growing top of a sapling; the small tree was buried entirely under the snow, which must have been at least chest-deep under her feet, promising a slow, cold death if she were all alone and lingered.

Dread coiled in her stomach for the first time since she had set out from the Trident.

_This is no place for us, Drogon, _she thought so the dragon could hear her.

They hadn't seen a high ground yet, suitable for a dragon to make his lair. The country was all sullen flatness and an excessive number of trees. There was a strange, wild beauty to these lands; Dany chose to compare it to that of Rhaegar's queen and their younger niece, Arya. A girl brimming with anger who had nonetheless chosen to spare Daenerys when she could have murdered her in her sleep.

_Why is Rhaegal here? _she asked Drogon in her mind, but the black dragon gave no answer, projected no shape, made no sound. He only urged her to take a seat between his spikes. They were flying low now and Drogon was searching the countryside with merciless, burning eyes.

At the northern end of the plains, a flat mountain loomed. It was crystal white and almost as high as the Great Pyramid of Meereen, just much, much longer on both east and west. _This must be the Wall, _Daenerys realised, _this should be my nephew's command._

There were no songs about the Wall. Or if there were Viserys didn't know them, and Mance Rayder wouldn't sing them. And Rhaegar only sang of Jenny of Oldstones of late. It was a beautiful ballad, but it only served to remind Daenerys of the emptiness in her heart. There were holes left in it by men that could not be filled by all the love of the dragons.

Daenerys would do anything for her resurrected brother. She even began to grow fond of his wife in a rather peculiar way. The same could not be said of Lyanna. The wolven queen was kind to Daenerys at first, but became distant and cold as the army moved north. Dany could tolerate her hostility as long as Lyanna reserved no such coldness for Rhaegar. As she decidedly did not; Lyanna would glow like one of those brilliantly blue winter roses whenever she was near her husband, now touching him, now not.

In sum, her good-sister was so fierce that Dany trusted her to care for Rhaegar while she was gone.

The woman and the dragon kept flying as close as possible to the soil and Dany knew they were near. As the Wall rose higher and higher in front of their eyes, the trees gave way and slowly disappeared. In the last grove of oaks before the open stretch of land facing the Wall they found scorched branches, bones and carcasses of wolves and rodents, scattered over the dirtied pall of snow.

Drogon landed quietly on the frozen ground. They still sank in, but only a bit. _Rhaegal, _Daenerys called, listening for the flapping of scaled wings.

No dragon came.

Her black one twisted his neck and tail. Staring at the Wall, he hissed and roared with frightening enmity. _Is Rhaegal a prisoner there? _Daenerys asked, guessing wildly. _Is Jon?"_

She urged Drogon a few times in her mind to fly over the Wall, but try as she might, he would not obey. The dragon padded the grove and the clearing in the middle, cawing like an overgrown raven. Daenerys never left his back, for protection against the cold.

The innermost tree was one that Dany had never seen yet. She had only heard Mance Rayder sing about it. It had to be a weirwood, whiter than snow, its leaves red like blood. It had an angry face carved on its trunk and its bulging eyes seemed to study Daenerys.

_A face of the old gods._

Daenerys shivered. She didn't believe in any god, for she had seen them all equally brought to ruin in Vaes Dothrak, the sacred city of the Dothraki where they brought the statues of the gods they had defeated and burned. No god could stand against the onslaught of determined and well-armed men.

Still no dragon came.

Drogon breathed fire on the smallest oak bordering the clearing, to set it aflame. Then he left Dany under the white tree, with the burning tongues for company, and went for a brief hunt. When he returned, he carried a dead bear cub in his paws. Daenerys flinched, remembering Ser Jorah Mormont, regretting only so slightly that she hadn't forgiven him when he had come back to her in Meereen.

Yet her hunger was such that as soon as Drogon dropped a portion of roast bear at her feet, she didn't think twice of eating it. It was the first time she tasted animal flesh in months. She had lost all appetite for meat since she was told Drogon had killed a child, a little girl. _Hazzea. _The dragon made short work of _half _the carcass, she noticed, and wrapped the other half in snow, as if to better preserve it. He paced up and down, restlessly, hitting at snow with giant talons, searching, sniffing, puffing.

The day was very short.

The moon rose pale before dusk before the thick layer of ice and frozen soil gave way under the claws of the dragon. There, Drogon dug frantically, and Daenerys helped him with a broken stick of weirwood as much as she could.

They uncovered an entrance to a tunnel descending underground, winding toward the white tree. Drogon could not pass through, but Dany could and did.

Among the gnarled white roots there was a hollow chamber in which she found Rhaegal, barely fitting in the enclosure he had sneaked in, sprawled like a dead cat in the streets of Meereen. It looked as if he had crept in weeks ago and then just kept growing in one place which had become too small to contain him. Rhaegal was now larger than Viserion, but still much smaller than Drogon.

Drogon cawed. _He's mourning, _Dany finally understood the sound. _But Rhaegal is not dead. _The green dragon moved his head, weakly. A bronze horn buried itself in a fat weirwood root. The dragon was incapable of liberating it.

"_Rhaegal, where is Jon?" _she asked of her green one in her mind, caressing and disentangling the stuck horn. Rhaegal was alive and he could get better. Dragons were not easy to kill.

Drogon let out a cry akin to mewling on the outside. Dany stepped aside to avoid charred bear meat flying in her direction through the tunnel. Fighting disgust, she legged the meal to the proximity of Rhaegal's snout, thankful for the boots she was wearing. The giant jaw opened lazily, sucked in the offering and snapped closed in a too slow motion. Rhaegal turned sideways as much as the cramped space allowed. He appeared unhurt, yet there was no doubt in Dany's mind that he was very, very sick.

"What is it, Drogon?" Daenerys chose to speak aloud to the familiar black presence invading her senses. Several days had passed since she had heard her own voice. Drogon breathed tiny puffs of fire at his brother till Rhaegal stirred and lifted the bronze horn again. His head sprang up only to collapse to the ground.

"Have you found Jon?" Dany asked of Rhaegal, but the green dragon's presence was too feeble, too far away. Drogon breathed some more smoke at him but none seemed to help. Black dread surged in her mind. She knew that Jon was somewhere behind that white mountain of ice and that he was in grave danger.

"Can you take me to him, Drogon?" Dany breathed. "And return to tend to Rhegal later on?" The black dragon was behind her, trying to widen the opening of the underground tunnel with tooth and claw, to no avail. Giving up, the beast crawled out where Dany could no longer see him.

In a heartbeat, a powerful streak of dragonflame broke into the weirwood chamber from the outside, narrowly missing Dany and Rhaegal. It was too cold for any wood down here to catch fire. An opening was made so Daenerys and her green one could see the pale moon. Drogon lowered his head to the hollow underground. The black dragon nuzzled his crippled brother, leaving tiny black crystals here and there on his green scales. It was the healing way of the dragons as Dany had discovered, and it never ceased to amaze her.

When he was done, her black one gazed at her with an angry eye, inviting, inviting...

Dany hugged Drogon's head. Her arms were now far too short to reach all the way around. As she did that, the dragon nudged her to look out upon the dancing moonshine... Or rather, at the distant Wall. Her vision blurred. For a second, she was looking at the Wall through the eyes of the dragons.

On top and over the entire visible length of the great Wall of ice, there was a dark black shadow. Unnatural. Sorcerous. Like the darkness she had glimpsed that existed in the House of the Undying in Qarth. The kind that had been after her and after her dragons ever since they had hatched, willing to suck all life out of them and put them to evil uses.

"You can't fly over, can you?" she asked of Drogon.

The black dragon stared at the green one.

"Oh no," Dany thought she understood. "He did try to fly over and now he's ill." Immense black and green sadness filled her mind. "What of Jon?"

Rhaegar had commanded Rhaegal to find Jon and bring him back. The dragon must have tried to obey the order many times until he was too weak to move. She sensed a black trepidation and a green uncertainty. "Jon is behind the Wall, isn't he?" Dany spoke with growing knowledge. "Drogon, is there a way to fly around?"

The blackness in her mind suggested that there was but it didn't deem safe taking her there. "I will be the judge of that," she said in her queenly voice, suddenly eager to be gone, eager to do what her brother wanted done. What harm could possibly befall her when she was with Drogon?

Black anger merged with black melancholy. The dragon obediently backed up through the hole he made, but not before he fondled his brother's belly with reassurance. Mindlessly, Daenerys commanded Drogon. "You will take me to Jon and you will leave me there. You will return and help Rhaegal and come for me only when he's better."

Maybe it wasn't wise. She couldn't help imagining Jon noble and handsome, just like his parents. But maybe Jon was as Lyanna thought Dany might have been. Maybe Jon hurt Rhaegal by intention or by chance. Maybe he was going to murder her on the spot when Drogon was gone. Yet the command had left her lips and they were already flying.

They flew alongside the Wall, all the way east and away from the brief sunset, parallel to the magic floating over the man-made mountain of ice. From close by, the shadow didn't lurk so evil. Perhaps it was not there to protect the Wall from the dragons crossing over as Dany thought.

Maybe it was a spell woven with a sole purpose; to keep out what was on the other side.

The Wall was very long but it still had an end. It gave way to the sea; clouds and storm, raging. The breakers hit the shore in bursts of salt water that could easily engulf a dragon had he not been clever and flown high enough.

Drogon was the most cunning of her children. He would find a way where Rhaegal could not.

"Is it far?" Dany squeezed out. Rain tore at her face, cutting cold. She felt the dragon's wrath. _You wanted to go_, he suggested with more detail that he could normally muster. "I did," she agreed, swallowing a mouthful of rainwater. It was warmer than the snow she had drunk after her supper of bear. _You still want to go_, the dragon insinuated with malice and Dany knew that for the first time since he had hatched, Drogon was angry at his mother. Truly angry.

So angry that when they lost sight of the sea, he lowered his huge body brusquely, to soar over a dark forest. When he dived between the snow ridden canopies of the wintergreen trees, she had to hold on to him for dear life. And when they were close enough to the ground that the fall would not kill her, Drogon shook so violently, in spasms of rage, till Daenerys slid over and landed in crispy, maidenly unspoiled snow.

And just like that, the dragon was gone, the moon was hidden, and all around her were trees.

It was so cold that she could hardly breathe. The air shot daggers down her throat. She drew an edge of the hrakar pelt in front of her mouth and it was a bit better. Knowing she couldn't stay where she was, she moved. But there was nowhere she could go. _I told him to bring me to Jon. _It would be the first time Drogon did not do as she bid him since they had faced Khal Jhaqo in the vastness of the Dothraki Sea.

Drogon wouldn't betray her to her death. _Would he? _Lyanna had been right about one thing. The dragons, beast and human, could kill each other. She wouldn't have believed it of her children. _Has there ever been a mother who would?_

She leaned on the nearest tree, feeling betrayed nonetheless. The trunk was huge and brown, not beautiful and white as the weirwood above the hollow where Rhaegal had been hiding. The canopy was so spacious above Dany that an entire hut of the lamb men from Lhazar could have fitted among the needle infested branches. She had never seen trees like that. Daenerys hit the bark with her fists, helpless, her own cold rage waking. The chill felt less bitter when she was angry as well.

She walked a bit around, looked up and then down. A piece of different tree-bark, red-brown, protruded from the snow. Dany was mesmerised by it. She had to touch it although a sudden instinct counselled her against it. She was in danger anyway, Drogon had said as much. What harm could one touch do? Unkindly, she tugged at it.

The bark turned out to be a garment of sorts on a thin, long hand as black as Drogon's scales. It only had three fingers and a thumb, and long, long claws. The hand gripped Daenerys' arm and used the princess to scramble up from deep snow where it had been buried, just like the sapling Dany had seen earlier.

The creature was much smaller than her, and Dany was not a tall woman. It looked like a little girl with a mane of unkempt auburn hair, huge blue eyes and large, almost pointy ears. When it opened its mouth it had no voice, only sharp yellow teeth. Dany tried to retrieve her hand, but the creature possessed extraordinary force. Like Euron, the dragon-stealer. The teeth snapped. Her dragon blood boiled. Using every ounce of her strength, Dany wrenched her arm free. There was bleeding from her wrist where the jaws had caught up, but the cold was such that it numbed the pain.

Daenerys backed to the tree trunk. A freezing sensation took hold of her back. The dwarf monster was closing on her, baring its fangs to snap at her throat, sharpening its claws to dig out her eyes or her heart. She had never seen anything like it and she hadn't been that afraid since Viserys' death.

"Help!" she screamed her lungs out, not expecting any.

In a reply, new snow started falling. A flake ended on her head, on her nose, on her chest. The creature jumped. Dany ducked and rolled away, her movement slow and clumsy due to the savage cold. The monster's collision with the tree saved her only for a moment. She stumbled backward, landing in the snow. The hrakar pelt spread under her as a sheet, soon to be soaked with her life blood. The claws were tearing at her new woollen trousers. They would climb higher and higher and then... She could only think how her maids had laboured for nothing, for nothing at all... And the jaws were coming so close, so very close… Too close to her throat.

Dany closed her eyes.

When no pain came, she dared to open them again.

A man loomed over her, a shadow covered in furs with jets of dark, long, unruly hair hanging out of a black scarf wrapped tightly around his head and mouth. Moonshine twinkled in his eyes. They looked young, dark as pitch, shining. Three more men wrestled with the creature that attacked her. One drew a knife to begin hacking it to pieces and...

"No!" Dany said rapidly. "There are four of you. Catch it if you can. Kill it only if you must." She sensed that the creature might be able to talk. Just like Aegon's companion, Lady Jeyne, could do when she had been a walking dead, or the despicable Lord Euron who was a wight still.

"Why pray?" the young man above her said dryly. "It wasn't going to spare you."

"No," Dany had to agree, "but that doesn't mean that I am bound to make the same choice."

The young man chuckled and stepped away. Under the furs his legs were gaunt, and his face had become terribly long when he laughed. Dark hair streamed in the moonlight when he moved, hardened with frost, as widespread wings of a bat. _Or a baby dragon,_ Dany thought.

"You heard the lady," he told his companions in a baffled voice laced with mockery. "She wants us to be gallant knights and catch her a monster." One of the other men, a balding one, climbed _up _the tree where Dany had fled from her attacker. In a moment he was down again with hempen rope. It took the strength of all four men to bind the creature who was wriggling, and wrestling and resisting, till all fight went out of it and its blue eyes looked quite dead.

Dany remembered a vision of such bleak blue eyes. She had had it in Essos, she knew, but she could not recall where nor what was it all about.

"There, my lady, if it please you, your own monster," the young man said, satisfied, returning his attention on her. He was not very tall or impressive in any way, much shorter than Khal Drogo or the sellsword captain Daario Naharis, and probably a little bit shorter than her brother Rhaegar. He was not older than Dany and looked as if he was still growing. Dark eyes glinted in the moonlight when he joked with her again. "And if it doesn't please you to meet more monsters, I suggest you accept our hospitality and take shelter in a tree with us."

By the time he offered her his hand to stand up, Dany didn't need the young man to tell her his name. Drogon had been true to her, as always.

Unlike Aegon, who looked like her, but who was not her nephew by blood, her real nephew looked very much like a Stark, like his mother. Yet the solemn, observant expression in his dark eyes, a glimmer of something that could be both strength and weakness, belonged solely to his father.

"My horse was frightened by... _this…_," she pointed at the creature. "It turned crazed and left me."

"There was no horse," a stout, wiry black-haired man with a widow peak contradicted her.

"There had to be, Pyke," the balding one said. "How else could she have gotten here? Flying?"

The third man, who looked older than Ser Barristan, only laughed at the ridiculous proposition that she could have flown. A notion formed in Dany's mind as she pondered how it was most fortunate that none of them seemed to have seen or recognised the dragon.

If she told them the truth, they'd probably think her a liar. She couldn't sense Drogon; the dragon must have gone back to Rhaegal. _He'll come back for me. He'll do just as I asked. _She felt guilty for thinking that Drogon could have ever betrayed her.

"We should not be far from the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea," her nephew said. "She could have come from there. Queen Selyse has brought plenty of southron women with her from Dragonstone. This one's probably one of them."

"I've never seen this one," the balding man was not easy to fool either. "Though I admit that the queen has many ladies waiting on her."

Dany said neither yes or no. The notion was now crystal clear in her head. There was only one way to do what Rhaegar had asked of her, to measure her nephew for what he truly was; he had to stay ignorant of her purpose for a while longer.

"My name is Dany," she said bravely. "I am indeed a lady in waiting. And a true knight would tell me his name by now."

"I'm only a bastard," her nephew said, "the name is Jon. Jon Snow. He's a knight," he showed the balding man, "Lord Davos Seaworth of Rainwood. That's somewhere in stormlands. He can tell you where better than I if you don't already know."

"You must have heard about the Onion Knight, my lady, if you indeed waited on the Queen Selyse," Lord Davos said.

"The Queen Selyse has only words of praise for the brave Ser Davos," Dany hoped she didn't exaggerate or wrongly pronounced the name of the unknown queen. His lordship of rainwood was becoming dour the more anyone mentioned Selyse.

Jon continued, "And Cotter Pyke here belongs to the Night's Watch. Before that, he came from the Iron Islands. You probably don't want to know what he did there."

"Nothing that would please the ladies," Pyke agreed. "I lived by the Old Way."

Dany knew from spending a very short time as a prisoner of Euron Greyjoy that the Old Way of the ironborn included reaving, killing and raping, not necessarily in that order.

"But that was before my blood ran black," Pyke put bluntly, as though he were asking her pardons for his past transgressions. Dany could not help but like the man, ironborn or not. He was a bit like Brown Ben Plumm, just younger. And she had forgiven Ben for betraying her.

"I am called Garth," the elderly man introduced himself. "It was some black crow called me that in my youth before I slit his throat. My mother died before she could name me so I had no name until that time."

Her nephew looked horribly startled by that confession of violence. Dany pitied him at once. The arm he had offered her dangled alone in the night air, unused.

She seized it to stand up. Jon's arm was pleasantly warm even through the gloves he wore. Not as warm as Drogon's paw, but it would have to do. He had a look of amazement for her own hands, which were bare and unblemished despite the cold and the fresh scratch on her right wrist. For some reason this northern winter only seriously threatened her feet. It didn't mean it was pleasant for her other parts, not by far. "Well then, Jon," she said, "better show me to that tree of yours."

Jon and Pyke helped her climb. Lord Seaworth and Old Garth dragged their prisoner, and tied the creature to hang in the lower branches of the tree. A bit further up, the men had built a flat of wood planks, branches and ropes. Daenerys soon learned you had to be careful where you sat and where you put your feet on it because the construction was anything but solid. Strangely, it was still holding under their combined weight. Not that she added much to it; Dany was a slight, slender woman.

"It's safer to rest here by night, and we travel by day. We're bound for Eastwatch." Jon explained. "And what brings a lady out on a winter night? Did the queen not warn all of you that there were snarks and grumkins about?"

Dany knew that there were white walkers just like she knew there were weirwoods, but she hadn't seen them yet either. "I guess that there are," she said, "but I've never seen one."

"It was sunny this afternoon," she ventured a wild guess. It had been sunny on the south side of the Wall. "I went for a ride with three other ladies. The day was shorter than we expected it to be. A blizzard came and I lost them." It was as good a lie as any. She wondered how far they were from the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. If they were not close enough, her new companions would see through her pretence very soon.

"Aye," Jon sounded as if he believed her, oddly enough. "The days are getting shorter." Grimness crept in his voice. Dark eyes focused on the living dead creature hanging below them in the tree. The fingers on his right hand flexed in his glove. She could almost imagine them touching the strings of a high harp. "Never fear, my lady," he said. "We shall bring you back to Eastwatch safely."

New determination removed all friendliness from Jon's eyes. "Maybe we shall find your horse as well," he said in a different tone, and then she knew that despite his kind words he _had_ been suspicious of her.

"I'll be looking as well," she said, purposefully feigning the voice of that young innocent girl she was not any more. She hadn't been that girl for years, maybe she never was.

Sleeping furs were stretched on the flimsy floor of the flat wood, and the night chill did not grow any less from all the talking. Dany decided to stay close to her nephew. If he groped her at night, she would learn another thing about him. She lay down between Jon and Lord Seaworth who curled next to her and immediately started snoring in earnest, indifferent to propriety. It was much warmer that way.

Jon, on the contrary, kept to the edge: he seemed to prefer needles and branches to her company. He maintained a good foot of distance between Dany and himself.

_Here is one who would put a sword between us, as my poor brother Rhaegar had done when he first travelled south to Dorne with his second wife to be. He had only wanted to save Lyanna from our father then. _The blade on Jon's hip was dragonglass, black, tapering, and most likely as sharp as Drogon's teeth. _Yes, _Dany was certain. _That's what Jon would do if he wore a sword to start with, although he might not be able to maintain the distance he desires with every woman._

For in the end, Rhaegar could not save Lyanna from himself, when she no longer wanted to be saved. Dany wondered idly what Jon would do if she reached for him now. Not that she had any intention to.

Twice married and twice a widow, Dany was not intimidated by the proximity of men.

"Come closer," she told her nephew, forcing her voice to sound less like a command. She was no queen here. And she could not very well return to her brother and admit that she had let his precious son freeze because he was not comfortable with her lady's charms.

Jon stayed still as a stone.

The woods obeyed her instead of her nephew; silence withdrew and queer noises came closer. The hooting and the howling of the wind on the rise struck them out of nowhere, soon followed by the treading of many feet sloshing in the snow. The strangers approached the tiny clearing on the ground below Jon and her. The wight they imprisoned rebelled fiercely against the restraints in the gloom, eager to join the newcomers. Dany craned her head to look down.

"Don't!" Jon urged her. "You don't need to see them."

She had to, no matter what he said. She was the blood of the dragon and she would look.

The dead were many. They were uglier than Euron's army; stronger, more determined. She thought she saw a dead bear among them or maybe a giant spider. They were marching to the Wall, if Dany didn't completely misjudge all directions during flight.

Her nephew pulled her into his body on an impulse. Their companions slept peacefully, undisturbed by the nightly commotion, and it seemed to Dany that Jon and her were the only two people awake in the entire world.

"Don't look down, my lady," he told her. "They can smell our blood, the blood of the living. And if you have a gentle heart, you might scream and they will hear us. We have only one obsidian blade and there are too many of them."

Dany felt the steady thud of her nephew's heart under the layers of clothing. It thumped faster when the howling of the gale was replaced by high-pitched, inhuman cries echoing all through the forest. Suddenly, there were no more wights under their tree. There were evil spirits of mist, walking slowly, carrying crystal swords; tremendous, merciless beings with bright blue eyes, changing shapes in the winter wind. She had never missed her dragon quite as much. _Drogon would make short work of these... Others..._ Dany hoped.

Her soul began freezing, as though it were no longer her own. Daenerys had never known fear as the one that took hold of her at that moment. Not even when she had woken a dragon in her brother Viserys, earning beatings and threats when her behaviour didn't please him.

Without Drogon's strength, she gave in to her fear. Shrinking, she buried her head in her own gloveless hands, away from both Jon's wool-clad chest and the gentle snoring of the Onion Knight. Her hands were still warm. They would be warm for a day after riding her dragon. She needed all the warmth she could gather. All life force.

"I told you not to look," Jon said, sounding stubborn like his mother.

"It's not your fault," Dany hurried to explain. "I wanted to see." She couldn't tell why it had been so important for her to look upon the face of the enemy.

Mist glided through the woods below them, heading steadily south, and all that time Dany kept shaking with fear. Jon was tense and stiff, gloved hand on his black blade, fingers flexing and unflexing. The Others marched on until the fog that had carried them dissolved and dissipated in the night, like a huge shadow of something that should not exist, cast on the world by the bitter whiteness of the snow.

And whether it was from the accomplishment of finding her nephew, from great tiredness or the aftermath of fear which still lay heavy on her being, Dany's eyelids turned into stone, dropping closed on their own accord. Without seeing, the world reduced itself to Jon's breathing next to her. The distance between them diminished and while they did not touch after his clumsy embrace, he should have now been able to share her body heat under the furs. Dany relived their encounter all over again to be sure of her conclusion.

Her nephew did not seem mad at all.

_I'll tell him everything on the morrow, _she thought, regretting her lack of sincerity for the first time tonight. _Drogon will return and fly us back to the kingsroad. When Jon sees the dragon he'll know that I must be telling the truth._

Safe and warm on the tree, Daenerys fell asleep. It felt almost like in her childhood home in Braavos, in the house with the red door.


End file.
